surplus thought

The market of exceptions and Michael Moore's Sicko

2007-09-19T21:52:00.000-04:00

I saw Michael Moore’s Sicko on the last day that it was showing in Northampton. Sitting by myself in the basement of Pleasant Street Theater, I had nothing better to do before movie began than to listen to the two elderly couples ahead of me discussing what they had heard about the film, their own medical woes, and how easy it was for them to see a doctor. Neither couple needed to use Medicare because in each case they had continuous coverage through their former employers. I could tell they thought of themselves as the fortunate ones. It turns out that they are not only the intended audience of the film but the subject of the film as well. For that matter, so am I.

Insurance as assurance

As he states from the outset, the focus of Moore’s film is not 45 to 60 million people who are excluded from access to care, rather it is a critique of the accessibility of care for those who think they are “covered.” His diagnosis seems to be that the private managers of care access consistently manage costs (and maximize profits) by ensuring that it is difficult to access care in the event that you actually need it. The more serious the ailment or injury the harder they try to impose constraints. Why are we surprised by this? Isn’t this the same sort of behavior (minimizing liabilities and maximizing gains) that we celebrate elsewhere in society? What would ever have led us to believe that things would be, or should be different in the domain of health care? I realize these questions bespeak a kind of naiveté, but I think these expectationsnot only have to do with caring labor itself but actually with the expectations/entailments that surround insurance. It is here what we expect and what we actually obtain diverge most widely.

Insurance, Uwe Reinhardt observed, is a socialization of risk whether it is delivered to us by the state or purchased from a private firm in the market. This socialization of risk, on a fundamental level, is simultaneously the creation of a fund that mitigates risk by entrusting the eventuality of illness or injury to an imagined community. The very nature of the service that “insurance” provides invites us to have faith that our needs will be met, that we will be taken care of, should the need arise. What Moore reveals is the chimerical nature of this social contract in the United States—this feeling of being “covered” lasts only so long as we do not need to actually access the health care system. Insurance is understood as the assurance that things will be okay. For many people, when the need actually arises, these assurances often reveal themselves as a cruel joke.

From “profit” to “surplus”

Part of Moore’s agenda is to challenge the idea that “profit” should have anything to do with health care or its allocation. I will return to this point at the end and argue that those of us who would like to see “profit” eliminated from health care must be equally insistent upon our support of an allocation of “surplus” for care. This is not a point that we can approach directly. The distance that separates “profit” from “surplus” is vast and must be traversed in precisely the way that Moore suggests—through a sort of “cultural” shift in perspective. By digressing into how the film (and Moore himself) has been received by critics I think we can brush in broad strokes the kind of cultural transformation Moore is attempting to produce in his films before addressing what might be missing from our perspective (as anti-essentialist Marxists).

In reading reviews of the film, two remarks seem to appear over and over again (though not necessarily in the same review). First, some argue that Sicko marks a point of departure in Moore’s cinematic career, that it was a sort of strategic move to the center. Unlike the preceding films—Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911—Moore seems to make a film here that had the potential to speak to the “insured” majority, even to those who would dismiss his documentary efforts out of hand as so much spin. The second common remark was that Moore continues to indulge in a sort of smarmy sentimentality—that he takes over the screen through his abundant corporeality and his willingness to stage an encounter between victims of the 911 rescue efforts and Cuban health care system and rescue workers.

In response to these observations, I would like to make the following claims. First, Sicko should be read as the third part in a trilogy and that its main argument entirely consistent with the themes that he explored in his previous two films. Second, Moore’s ‘sentimentality’, which seems to draw such a negative reaction—from “liberals” as well as “conservatives”—, stems from his effort to tell a particular story that makes both “sides” uncomfortable. In each of these films, he produces a complicated representation of the U.S. culture—particularly its tendency towards fear, aggression, and mistrust. This fear/aggression is inwardly directed in Bowling for Columbine and xenophobic Fahrenheit 9/11. In some ways, Sicko brushes up against this culture of mistrust in its most abstract form. The “fear” that this film seems to circle around is the fear that a national health insurance system would result in out-of-control demand—manifesting itself in long lines, higher taxes, and diminished personal opportunity. Moore does his best to allay these fears by interviewing a successful French couple, pointing out that physicians live quite well in the U.K, and that the wait for treatment in other countries in most cases is not too much longer than in the United States.

Ultimately though I think Moore realizes that these anecdotal examples and arguments are not going to be sufficient to produce the cultural shift in perspective that he is hoping for. This fear of the other(’s demand) is not so easily dispelled. It reflects a deep seated economistic belief in America’s “individualist” psyche. The telling moment in the film was when Moore casually asked the French physician if something similar to the French health care system could be created in the United States to which the Frenchmanautomatically responded with an emphatic “NO”. Moore’s hope is to somehow produce a counter-narrative U.S. history and culture, an alternative identity founded in a sense of hospitality and generosity. I think this effort, and its sometimes latent sometimes explicit patriotism, is regarded as hypocritical by his critics on the right and with hostility on the left because it breaks from the usual left-critical agenda. The usual charge that follows this is that Moore is a muddled populist who raises some good points but fails to deliver a comprehensive analysis (a.k.a., to make a documentary film that no one would actually watch).

At the risk of boring everyone in a different way [No Bigbadbull, you are not boring us. Editor.] I would like to take a different critical approach to Moore’s work. Rather than suggest that Moore is a smarmy opportunist, a hypocrite (and he may well be both of those things, I do not know the man) or that he is theoretically muddled, I think there is a way of reading his film in relation to contemporary theory which reveals a depth in the film. My approach here is to argue that Moore’s film reflects some of the decisive issues in contemporary social theory and that there is an attendant theoretical sophistication to the film that he may or may not have been aware.

Moore with Agamben

Moore’s trip to Guantanamo Bay was to demonstrate that the enemies of the United States get better care than the people who heroically attended to the 9/11 disaster (a dramatic move based on the false premise that the people confined there are actually receiving the care the government says they are). If it is not correct to say that enemy combatants receive better care than American heroes (though both parties would fare better under the Cuban system), than what is the correct relationship between the enemy combatants and Americans who are nominally insured but find themselves outside of the care system? This question got me thinking about Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and The State of Exception and their analyses of governance. What I would like to argue here is that beneath Moore’s false premise—that Guantanamo inmates have universal health care and we don’t—is a more startling truth that also comes through in the film when the film is read in a particular way.

Michael’s false start—his brief consideration of the man who needed to choose between his middle finger and his ring finger (I would have picked the middle, of course) and other examples of the excluded were truly unsettling. Moore lets know that these people—who also look like the average American to his audience—are not the focus of his film. This, of course, begs the question: Why not!?! I think Moore’s strategic decision to focus on the “insured” rather than the uninsured partially confirms a fear that I have about what the usual call for universal access logically implies to skeptics. Namely, if the system is already inadequate, how much will it be helped by extending coverage to 45 to 60 million more people? Of course, the easy way in which the current rhetoric around access has shifted to identify immigrant demand for health care as part of the problem reveals the extent to which the broader public is unconsciously invested in a logic of scarcity.

Here I am reminded of Agamben’s reflections on the role of both an excluded other (the terrorist) and the state that defines itself as the exception endowed with the ability and entrusted with the duty to suppress this disruptive power of the excluded. The logic of the constitutive exception and its counter part, homo sacer, work to define the parameters of citizenship—who is under the law’s protection and who is beneath it--but they function as a conceptual topology. The example Agamben gives us is that of the ban—in which a person is simultaneously outside of the law of one state while also being clearly defined by it—that what emerges here is a zone of indetermination where the banned is simultaneously inside and outside of the law.

[It's not just the identity of the citizen that is defined within this topological space but their rights as well. In some sense we can see already that a citizen’s right to care, is only secure so long as the rights of non-citizens are denied—though really we should not accept this at face value (most Europeans would insist on carrying travelers insurance within the United States but in other countries, the need for treating foreigners is more or less just seen as a cost that can be socially borne.)]

Zizek’s chilling observation is that the meaning of this zone of indetermination establishes the exception and the excluded other is precisely to be found in this conceptual indetermination, its expandability. We are all, potentially, homo sacer: A subject that can be killed without being sacrificed.

Linda Peno, in her testimony before congress, spoke precisely on this point. Working for a private insurance company she condemned people to death without it being deemed a murder but is instead a justifiable denial of treatment. I think Peno’s testimony brings something about insurance secured through a private company into relief. The “buyer” of insurance is not in a position to understand all the contingencies that might emerge in relation to choosing one particular insurance plan as opposed to another. It's true, access to medical care in countries with socialized medicine can be restricted to medicines and treatments with proven (as opposed to experimental) efficacy but the fact that this is done through the state means, in theory, there is political redress.

Consider for instance the following scenario. If I were to have Blue Cross medical and discover that I had a condition that required a treatment that they refused to pay for, it would, at that point, be too late to switch to another plan and would most probably be too large an expense to bear myself. Faced with such a predicament, it is usually understandable for the afflicted individual to exclaim—“Why did I bother with insurance when they are not, in fact good for anything?” There are two possible explanations for this. When we secure insurance (whether we purchase it ourselves or obtain it through an employer) we are not paying into a bank that will payout in our time of need, we are in fact paying for the insurer to act as a broker of sorts, effectively securing a rate of discount for us with a physician or hospital—paying these providers a certain amount and leaving the remainder for us. While insurance is, as Reinhardt says, a collectivization of risk, which risks are deemed “acceptable” and “worth taking” are not specified beforehand because they are at the discretion of the private insurer. The decision as to whether or not to pay for an experimental treatment for stage IV breast cancer is something an insurer decides—it is not, in a straightforward way, up for negotiation. Is it not the case then that the insurer acts as Agamben’s sovereign—as the entity that administers bare life?

Totalitarianism Insured

“Politics in our age had been entirely transformed into biopolitics was it possible for politics to for politics to be constituted as totalitarian politics to a degree hitherto unknown.” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 120)

As the film underscored with several examples, this privately administered zone of indetermination that separates inside from outside, the insured from the excluded, is administered retroactively—the example of the woman who was denied treatment for a serious illness because she had failed to disclose an aspect of her past history (a yeast infection). It is easy enough to recognize the “totalitarian”/undemocratic way in which health care access is allocated. I am not sure however that this is the real scandal. My diagnosis is that, on a certain level, most people in the U.S. would prefer to have a bio-politics of administration than to wrestle with the difficult issues—ethical and economic—as it pertains to the allocation of care.

This freedom from worry and ethical responsibility has a price.

As much as I think Moore might be right that the U.S. culture is currently dominated by fear as well as a calculating mistrust of the other’s demand (for care, for work, etc.), I am not sure that the correct solution is necessarily to just remind Americans of their generous and charitable past. At the same time, I think what needs to be confronted more directly is our passivity. Just to speculate for a moment, what if the ideological comfort that insurance as it currently exists offers is that the anonymous bureaucrat does the wet work of sacrifice without our having to know about it?

There is another, larger question, that Moore raises without really pursuing it too far. Social security is a collectivized response to the problem of old age and the need to reproduce oneself after one has stopped working. As Hayakawa pointed out in the early 1940s, there is an important difference between how we understand social security and the way we think about various “social entitlements”—welfare payments, food stamps, and Medicaid. Social security is understood as a universal system that is not administered on the basis of need—rather it is a social guarantee that we can enforce because everyone is perceived as having “paid into” the system. In contrast, programs like Medicaid are a type of entitlement that accrues to some because of their indigence, but not to others. The recent declaration by President Bush that he would veto the measure to extend SCHIP (the program that insures children in families that earn up to three times above poverty) is a case in point as to how decisions get made in relation to needs-based entitlements—who gets it, how big is the entitlement, and how long should it last, lest we encourage the dreaded “dependence” are all relevant questions because of the basic way that we perceive these types of social reproduction.

In principle, of course, I do not have a problem with the ethical standard—“from each according to their ability, to each according to his need”. The allocation of care, social support, and welfare is always going to be conducted in relation to this ethic because the need for care is not evenly distributed and capacities—no matter how blessed we are—are highly contingent. Perhaps our resistance to thinking of health insurance as a type of social security—as something that all are entitled to regardless of need—could be overcome if we came to see ourselves as having already earned it.

I think there might be a number of ways of doing this that carry us beyond what gets represented and discussed in Moore’s films—though he comes closest in his interview with Tony Benn—and back to some of the very issues that Saint ymM represented in his post on the subject some weeks ago.

commercial crusades

2007-09-13T20:03:00.000-04:00

Illegal Attacks is the new single from Ian Brown (of the Stone Roses fame) featuring Sinead O'Connor in the backing vocals. The video and the lyrics are below.

So what the fuck is this UK
Gunnin with this US of A
In Iraq and Iran and in Afghanistan

Does not a day go by
Without the Israeli Air Force
Fail to drop it’s bombs from the sky?

How many mothers to cry?
How many sons have to die?
How many missions left to fly over Palestine?
Coz as a matter of facts
It’s a fact, it’s an act
These are illegal attacks
So bring the soldiers back
These are illegal attacks
It’s contracts for contacts
I’m singing concrete facts
So bring the soldiers back!!!!

What mean ya that you beat my people (2x)
And grind the faces of the poor

So tell me just how come were the Taliban
Sat burning incense in Texas
Roaming round in a Lexus
Sitting on six billion oil drums
Down with the Dow Jones, up on the Nasdaq
Pushed into the war zones

It’s a commercial crusade
‘Coz all the oil men get paid
And only so many soldiers come home
It’s a commando crusade
A military charade
And only so many soldiers come home

Soldiers, soldiers come home
Soldiers come home

Through all the blood and sweat
Nobody can forget
It ain’t the size of the dog in the fight
It’s the size of the fight in the dog on the day or the night
There’s no time to reflect
On the threat, the situation, the bark nor the bite
These are commercial crusades
Coz all the oil men get paid
These are commando crusades
Commando tactical rape
And from the streets of New York and Baghdad to Tehran and Tel Aviv
Bring forth the prophets of the Lord
From dirty bastards filling pockets
With the profits of greed

These are commercial crusades
Commando tactical raids
Playing military charades to get paid

And who got the devils?
And who got the Lords?
Build yourself a mountain, drink up in the fountain

Soldiers come home (4x)

What mean ya that you beat my people (2x)
And grind the faces of the poor

Teoman Aktürel (1932-2007)

2007-08-07T11:01:00.000-04:00

[Teoman Aktürel, poet and translator, passed away on the 13th of July, 2007. His formal education is in French Language and Literature and Economics. He was a family friend. While I was in high school, for a while every Sunday, before going to grandma for lunch, I would go to his small one bedroom apartment in Caddebostan, Kadıköy and practice French with him. Mostly, he would be just waking up, smoking his Birinci cigarettes. I would make him coffee and help him tidy up his perennially untidy apartment with piles and piles of books, journals, manuscripts, weekly and monthly literature magazines and newspaper clippings. Though I was not really a leftist then, I was begining to appreciate his left perspectives. At that period, I read his translation of Philippe Soupault's Charlie Chaplin (Şarlo) with fascination. His use of Turkish language was clear and sharp. While he insisted on using new Turkish words, he always did it gracefully, without sounding too obsessed with it. I really began to appreciate his poetry only later, in the early nineties, during my college years. For the Istanbul based post-punk, high-art to low-art fanzine Mondo Trasho (cannot remember which issue), I made a page using his poem "Devrim" ("Revolution"). I found this poem below in a collection of selected translations of contemporary poetry from Turkey.]

Poppies Bloom on His Poor Face

In the August heat, in Pergamon
I bent down and drank from the "Sacred Spring"
In the late afternoon
I watched the "Small Theater" in amazement

Opposite me, angry, hurt, sat Apollinaire
Shaking his bandaged head at me
In his mouth, that bitter tune "Au Prolétaire"
He moved to one corner, feeling very sad

Prisons are full up to to the brim
The number of licensed ladies is increasing
Olive branches, corn silk
The rich forever enjoying themselves

The truth is moaning under pressure
Mornings I'm on the sands, evenings on the Island Cunda
Wineglasses clink in Greek and in Turkish
Lover of love, I'm "both the dagger and the wound"

The sun sets, the moon rises in the gulf
Cheerful songs ring through the shimmering light
Women and men are all out in the open
Clapping hands, playing, dancing

The song-maker is searching for a rhyme
His eyes resting on the young girl's breasts
And he offers her some mint-candy
His heart inside the wrapping paper

Poppies bloom on his poor face.

Translated by Yurdanur Salman
"Zavallı Yüzünde Gelincik Açıyor" (unpublished poem)
as published in Contemporary Turkish Poetry: A Selection, edited by Suat Karantay, Istanbul: Boğaziçi University Press, 2006.

Refugees...Until When?

2007-08-05T11:01:00.000-04:00

1 refugee camp, 20 kids, 11 villages, 8 of which are only remnants, or not even that. These are the stats of the Birthright Replugged trip that I helped run a few weeks ago. I’m not sure where to even begin to explain the significance of this trip.

The kids are all under the age of 16 and from the Jenin Refugee camp. The city of Jenin is in fact mostly the camp, housing refugees from the ’48 Nakba. The camp is massive, and was majorly destroyed in 2002 when Israeli forces besieged the city, entirely leveled flat huge areas, killed more than 50 people, and left more than 4,000 homeless (again). Temporary tents were set up to house victims after the siege, in the same exact place as the original tents of the camp from 1948.

Many of these children have never left the camp, and for some, sadly, it will have been the only time. When they turn 16, they will get a huwiyya, an id card, and will be subject to the travel restrictions on Palestinians, which means that they will not be able to travel into ’48 Palestine, and that their travel around the West Bank will be seriously restricted, and at times cut off at the whim of the Israeli military administration. This particular group of kids are all involved in the activities of the Freedom Theatre, and their families all come from 11 villages in the north of 1948 Palestine.

So why are these called “villages of origin?” Well, first of all, these villages continue to be identity markers for these children. They all know their villages of origin, often know so many stories of those villages, and in some cases, still carry the nuanced dialects of different areas. Their families often still have the keys or the land deeds to the original houses fled from in ’48. The elders know the land like it is their own bodies, and can tell you how many meters from the house was the well, how many steps to take to get from this tree to that.

But the children? They are 3rd generation refugees, and most of them don’t know any world besides their camps. The camps, once an amassment of UN tents, are now cities, albeit rough ones made of concrete houses tightly packed together. Some of the children have been displaced in their lives too, due to home demolitions, a favoured tactic of the Israeli forces to address “security issues” which can range from collective punishment for the family (or neighbours) of a resistance fighter, to making way for settlers or army roads to accompany the apartheid wall. But these kids do not “know” their villages of origin in ’48, they have never seen them, and as I said before, most of them are amongst the more than 400 villages destroyed in ’48. So what does it mean to take kids “back” to their villages? Indeed, the rhetoric of origins and return is loaded since Zionism has used that language to talk about Jewish “return” to its “origins.”

first trip to the sea
The Replugged trip has various goals and aims. One is to just help the kids get out of the camp, to see other settings, to visit the sea, to sleep a night without the sounds of Israeli incursions. Since the adults of the camp are prohibited from traveling, this is one thing that internationals can help with. But the main goal is to creatively work towards the right of return, as it will not come just through political negotiations (this may be the last step, if it is ever possible), but through maintaining connections, and freeing those connections from the confines of the memory in the camp, to allow for the children to start developing their own dynamic relationships to their grandparents memory, and to envision what the right of return means to them, what it will look like taking into consideration the facts on the ground.

It was nothing short of appalling to be on the bus with them and to arrive to their villages, of which they may have a clear picture in their mind, and then to find that it is a dog pound, a garbage dump, a military base, a JNF forest, or a Jewish only settlement. I witnessed such heartbreaking confusion when we rolled into a modern kibbutz with swimming pools and palm trees and the kids asked, is this our village? Are these our houses? Will they be our houses again one day? In another case, in the infamous town of Ayn Hawd, where the original Palestinian houses were taken over and “maintained” by Israeli artists, while some of the refugees settled only meters away on a hill, where they can see their houses and occupiers. One of our kids from Jenin went to her grandfather’s house, now occupied by a shirtless artist who told her unthinkingly that she can come back (to visit) anytime, and another child retorted “actually she will turn 16 next year, and will be prohibited from leaving the West Bank.” This exchange is typical of a liberal Israeli attitude towards Palestinian refugees, i.e. at our convenience you can visit, so long as you are otherwise caged into your ghetto.

So how can we follow up from such a trip? The kids are working on an exhibition with the photos they took on the trip, which will debut in Jenin and then travel to the U.S. to get their stories out. Outside of Palestine, we can support Palestinians working towards the right of return. This is one of the three conditions agreed upon by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations in their call for the international community to boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions on Israel. And for the kids? They now have a new collection of images and a new set of difficult questions to guide them in their quest for return, and they

will be the new leaders of the movement to liberate Palestine armed with their experience, dreams, and their questions that will compel them forward.

Asma drums on the site of her village of origin, destroyed in 1948

Through A Glass Darkly

2007-07-31T05:49:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, at a table, where ymM was also sitting, I dared to argue... it was a small gathering of four of us after having watched Cuaron's recent "Children of Men"; we were, you know, chatting on film and philosophy (how the latter shall be handled in the former), strangely lost somewhere around the discussion on the decadent environment in Turkey... Anyway, there, under these utterly hollow circumstances, in front of everybody, I dared to argue that Bergman is, to put it politely, not as important as people usually consider him to be.

Of course, it was just for the sake of provocation but the whole thing failed. No one at the table took me seriously, and the chat went on. Monsieur F., sipping his cold white wine, explained us why Turkey will soon turn into South Africa. Mobs will shot "blacks" on streets. We did not oppose, it was too late and too mellow, and too hot.

After two days, Bergman died. I cannot imagine a more terrible position that a self-proclaimed cinephile can put himself into.

But there is more.

After years of deferral, resistance to the urge of swallowing his filmography wildly, I had finally given up, the day before this small gathering, I watched "Smiles of a Summer Night" after breakfast, "Wild Strawberries" in the afternoon, with tea and biscuits, and finally "Seventh Seal", as it deserves, just before midnight. When I went to bed, completely baffled, it was different, i was able to say to Salkim. Dreyer, Tarkovsky, something; but different. Then during the weekend, we watched "Through a Glass Darkly" and "Winter Light" (the first two films of his famous trilogy; "Silence" which I haven't seen yet, is the last part). He was still alive then and we were falling in love with him. And he died.

***

Two personal reasons why I finally decided to "go back" to Bergman --you always have this bizarre "feeling", even if you haven't seen one minute of his films before, that you have to know his films if you want to think seriously on cinema-- were his constant engagement with the question of God (not "existing" yet always somewhere there) and that he chose the life of solitary artist, on a small island off coast of Sweden (Faro, which I believe he discovered for "Through a Glass Darkly").

humiliating work and the law

2007-07-29T18:38:00.000-04:00

i'm trying to think through some issues raised by wilson v. monarch paper co., 939 f.2d 1138 (5th cir. 1991) and similar cases. in this case, a jury found, and the court system upheld on appeal, that the vice president of a company was entitled to millions of dollars in compensation for intentional infliction of emotional distress after being demoted to warehouse janitor. this raises many questions and thoughts that i'd like to explore on an ongoing basis. for now i'll put things in point form, since my thoughts are scattered.

- intentional infliction of emotional distress is not an easy kind of case to win, because the standards for abuse are pretty high. in wilson, the required standard was that the offending conduct (i.e. demoting wilson to janitor) be so outrageous that civilized society should not tolerate it.

- how widespread is the attitude that it is humiliating to be a janitor? do janitors think so? if not, are they simply in denial, or was the jury wrong?

- or is it a situation where the jury believed that the humiliation is not a general social fact but is particular to the former vice president, either because of his idiosyncratic personal beliefs or because of the beliefs prevalent in his social class? it seems unlikely that a jury would find IIED and a judge would uphold it based on beliefs particular to an individual or class, unless it is a class belief shared by the judge and the majority of the jury. not to mention the appellate panel of judges that upheld the finding.

- just what is it, anyway, that makes it humiliating for someone to be a janitor? are the factors purely social or is there something innate to humans that makes such work inherently humiliating?

- if, as i assume, the humiliation of being a janitor is entirely or primarily a social fact, why is such a social fact constructed? and why is a remedy for this humiliation offered in the narrow circumstances of executive demotion, but not in the broader setting of a society that assigns some people humiliating jobs on a career basis? in other words, how does the view that civilized society cannot tolerate the demotion of an executive to janitor reconcile with the fact that the same (presumably) civilized society assigns many people to be career janitors? what does this tell us about the relationship between law and society?

- all this assumes that what the jury found to be humiliating was the job itself, not, say, the fact that the person was forcibly transferred from one job to another, or the fact that someone was removed from a lucrative job. this seems to be borne out: we can safely assume that no jury would find emotional distress for someone who was transferred from janitor to VP, if the judge even allowed the case to proceed to a jury; and the law makes it perfectly permissible to fire a high-level employee for no good reason - certainly it's not considered outrageous conduct.

- one conclusion that can be drawn is that in the eyes of the law, it is much better for a vice president to be fired than to be forced to choose between working as a janitor and quitting, which is always an option. can the conclusion also be drawn that it is better for people in general to not work at all than to work as a janitor? advocates of "welfare reform" suggest that it is more dignified to do any work than to do no work at all. but if this is true, why is it abusive to make a vice president choose between working as a janitor or quitting, but not abusive to simply fire him?

- one possible answer is that we believe in meritocracy: it is not unconscionable to have a society in which some people are forced to have humiliating jobs, because our society allows the individual some agency in determining his or her ultimate circumstances: people who are meritorious (by some definition that we need not look into right now) are rewarded with non-humiliating jobs, while those who are not meritorious must accept humiliating jobs. what is abusive is to improperly assign a meritorious person like wilson to a humiliating job.

- the problem with this is that it is very widely recognized that whatever role merit plays in determining one's job prospects, it is far from the only factor, and circumstances of birth are a major determinant of whether or not one will end up in a humiliating job. and while this fact is lamented among liberals, it is tolerated by them, while illiberals seem to have no problem with it. would such illiberals on a jury not have found for wilson? or is this further confirmation that reactionaries lack analytical and/or moral intelligence?

Health Care Reform Debate and Feminine Sexuation: Passage to the Act

2007-07-28T16:29:00.000-04:00

(Dear reader, sorry for the delay in posting--this summer has been one long emotional roller coaster ride so far.)

Part 3 of “Health Care and the Community Economy: Towards an Ethics of Surplus and Geography of Sufficiency.”

Feminine Sexuation and Health Care Reform

So far we have learned what it is like to fail in relation to economic imperative—to fail to balance social reproduction and economic growth … My qualitative research alerted me that it is also possible to fail in relation to one’s ethical commitments.

One interview that stands out in this regard was with Dr. Norman Haug of Del Norte Colorado—driving force behind the creation of The Rio Grande Hospital. Del Norte is a remote town in South East Colorado with a mostly poor rural farming population and a seasonal tourism industry. Like a lot of poor rural communities access to health care was a real problem. Norman was able convince HUD to provide Del Norte with a loan type 242 that allowed for the construction of a critical care hospital to serve the local community. To obtain the grant he had to prove to HUD that the hospital was economically viable.

First Norman needed to raise a 1.5 million dollars in order to qualify for the loan—the first of its kind to be provided by HUD outside of the NY/NJ area. In addition to solicitations large and small the land for the hospital—valued at 400K--was also gifted by a land owner. To prove that the critical care hospital was viable one argument Norman made was that it would serve the tourists that came to the area for hunting and other excursions. The decisive point proved to be the hospitals designation as a critical care facility by Medicare.

This meant that Medicare—the insurance form for 70% of the patients—would reimburse the Rio Grande on a cost basis rather than according to capitated formularies—in the absence of this arrangement, the hospital would lose money. One of the rationales behind the critical care hospitals is that they provide care in sparsely populated areas that would otherwise fail to constitute a viable market.

This leads some to dismiss the Rio Grande as a state charity case but Norman disagrees on two counts: First, We would not argue for the centralization of police or educational services on the basis of market demand… nor should we argue for a centralization of medical services. Second, once transport and higher overhead in urban hospitals are figured into the equation—critical care facilities and rural hospitals are cost effective responses to definite need.

Situating the Rio Grande in the Diverse Economy

It is useful to situate the story of the Rio Grande hospital in the context of the diverse and community economy diagram, with its partial typology of economic difference in the dimensions of exchange, compensation and organization. For those of you familiar with A Post-Capitalist Politics, it will be unnecessary to go over the way in which this representation of the economy as a space of open-ended heterogeneity describes an actually existing diversity of forms of exchange, compensation, and economic organization (the dimension of class). The Rio-Grande is a state capitalist enterprise that exists to serve a particular constituency. While it has clearly been enabled by a generous state transfer from HUD and its designation as a critical care facility by Medicare, it’s also clear that it exists as a community asset because of the generosity of local citizens. In turn, it is a context in which Norman and the other physicians are able to generously serve the care needs of the local and transient population—including legal and illegal immigrants. (45% of care is free care) and the market of insured patients.

Thus the Rio Grande is “viable” because of the support that it receives and because its mandated purpose is to service a geographically finite need. There is, of course, a limit to Rio Grande’s capacity but it no longer needs to be read in relation to infinite demand and self-interested practitioners.

Lacan’s counter-posed feminine logic becomes relevant here. In this view there is no constitutive exception—all are subject to the law, and yet no one is completely subjected. In the world of feminine sexuated logic limits remain, including limits to care, but they are seen as provisional. Here “scarcity,” and the need for “economic growth,” no longer act as over-arching imperative. In my view, it is this move towards the relational possibilities (and constraints) of a feminine logic rather than the fixed miserly injunction of masculine logic that allows us to re-imagine the politics of health care reform in relation to sufficiency.

Feminine logic, as Copjec says, “obliges us to recognize the finitude of all phenomena, the fact that they are inescapably subject to the conditions of time and space and must therefore be encountered one by one, indefinitely, without the possibility of reaching an end, a point where all phenomena would be known. The status of the world is not infinite but indeterminate.”

Health care reform will continue to fail us, but we will fail to arrange and allocate care in relation to an ethical imperative rather than a miserly economistic imperative. We need a language of partial subjection in order to produce a politics of ethical possibility. A sufficient response to definite need is something that is intelligible in the spatio-temporality of needs encountered “one at a time.” Likewise, the range of existing assets, and the generosity of the community—and here I include the state as simply a part of community—needs to be encountered in their particularity also. While this indeterminate mobilization of social surplus, generosity and ethical commitment is what allows for the Rio Grande to succeed—the success of community health centers elsewhere would depend on the identification of definite resources (and constraints) that occur in any given area.

Fifty years ago people took the risk and they built these hospitals, we need to do it again. And we just need to get it done… Get the hospital built and let the person whose going to be here ten years from now worry about it. I mean that sounds callous but that’s what it amounts to. (Norman 2005)

Derrida taught us that an act can only be considered ethical when the outcome of the act is uncertain. What is clear from his statement here is that Norman truly is not clear what the outcome of his efforts will be but he is willing to act anyways. Perhaps Norman’s status as an ethical agent—his willingness to take the risk in order to “get it done”—allows us to see the typical mainstream approach to health care reform, as mired in a masculine sexuated logic of impossibility, as an imaginary solution whose elegance and inevitable failure leaves things exactly as they are. The imagined social harmony between the conservation of capital and the equitable allocation of care is never arrived at and this failure is symptomatic of a castrating approach to health care reform.

In contrast, Norman’s capacity to meet the needs of the immediate community, his adoption of the standard of a sufficient response in relation to definite pressing needs, is sustained not by the idea of a final/fantastic end point but a spirit akin to what Zizek describes as “enthusiastic resignation.” Through Norman we can come to see the difference between the failure to embody (the reconciliation of equitable health care allocation and continued economic growth) versus a failure in relation one’s ethical principles (to care and accept whatever comes as a result of this commitment).

How is that Norman came across this affective disposition, this willingness to pass to the act?

labor unions in the U.S. fight for apartheid!

2007-07-27T12:56:00.000-04:00

a recent story in the forward reports that leaders of american labor unions are stepping up to support israeli apartheid by undermining opposition to it by british unions.

many union leaders have signed on to a letter by the jewish labor committee bashing* the growing movement for anti-apartheid divestment, boycotts and sanctions by the british labor unions. these signatories unfortunately include ron gettelfinger, the head of my old union, the UAW. it also includes major unions like the AFL-CIO, right-wing unions like the IBEW and the teamsters, and some allegedly progressive unions like UNITE-HERE. notably absent are the SEIU and the left-wing unions such as UE, who tend not to join the frenzied mob when israel gets challenged.

my old local, by the way, UAW local 2322 in western mass, overwhelmingly - in fact, unanimously, if i recall correctly - approved a resolution to support divestment back in 2003. unfortunately, in the UAW the wishes of the rank-and-file bear little resemblance to what's expressed by the leadership.

this wrongheaded approach by U.S. unions contrasts with their positions during the apartheid era in south africa, where unions worldwide took a stand against apartheid. it also contrasts with union attitudes in the rest of the world, even the english-speaking world. in britain, a number of unions have passed resolutions calling for private sanctions against israel, or for encouraging their branches to consider sanctions. in canada, a major public-sector union in ontario, CUPE, voted unanimously for sanctions.

and of course, south african trade unions, whose membership has directly experienced apartheid and remembers the solidarity of international unions, is far in the lead in opposing israeli apartheid. as willie madisha, president of COSATU, south africa's congress of trade unions, says:

As someone who lived in apartheid South Africa and who has visited Palestine I say with confidence that Israel is an apartheid state. ... workers and democrats of the world ... heeded our call when we struggled against apartheid. Boycotts, disinvestments, and sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa hastened our march to democracy. Why should it be different for Palestinians?

--------
* otherwise normal people often go crazy when israeli racism is challenged. at some point i may tell the instructive story of the hysterical reaction to the umass divestment campaign, including by many people who are considered respectable and who consider themselves progressive.

academy fights: round 2 to the fascists

2007-07-25T14:09:00.000-04:00

this past june, professor norman finkelstein was denied tenure by depaul university thanks to a concerted effort by alan dershowitz. yesterday, the university of colorado fired tenured professor ward churchill thanks to an effort by the horowitz-ACTA crowd.

i remember long ago reading an essay by stephen king in which he instructed his readers how to act when they've heard of a case of censorship: to immediately get the censored material and read it. censorship usually targets interesting and relevant ideas. finkelstein and churchill have not been censored, but they have been punished for their political views by a system that is supposed to reward intellectual accomplishment and protect the academy from political intimidation. for the enemies of critical thought, actual censorship is not a viable short-term goal, so they are instead making inroads into a more manageable goal: distorting academic debate by intimidating faculty who are independent-minded and critical in tone.

in the case of finkelstein and churchill, i happen to have read extensively of both of their works, and i recommend them without reservation. they are two of the sharpest analytical minds that i've ever read, and they both write clearly and engagingly on important topics. it is partly for these reasons that they are being targeted by the enemies of intellect. for these reasons i suggest that the appropriate response to this particular attack on critical thinking is to read these authors.

neither decision was plausible on its merits. in finkelstein's case, there was no pretense of applying the universal standards for tenure - quality of teaching and research. he was denied tenure for his "tone". if this seems like a subjective non-standard, that's because it is. he was denied tenure because conservatives don't like what he writes, and because twice he's made the conservative intellectual establishment look very, very foolish. first as a graduate student, by exposing joan peters' anti-palestinian propaganda tome "from time immemorial" as a fraud; then by demonstrating the extraordinary stupidity and absence of merit in alan dershowitz's anti-palestinian book "the case for israel".in churchill's case, there was a pretense of applying a reasonable standard - he was accused of research misconduct. but the pretense is transparent. the president of the university who recommended his termination is a right-wing ideologue who belongs to ACTA, a highly ideological group, founded by lynne cheney and joe lieberman, dedicated to opposing critical thinking in the academy about history and politics. when it became public knowledge a few years ago that churchill had written a highly inflammatory essay about 9-11, the university president promised to subject churchill's writings to an extraordinary level of scrutiny, and convened a committee that did so. in a report that is itself subject to complaints of misconduct (but has not been investigated), the committee concluded that churchill had plagiarized and falsified information relating to native american history, though not in any scholarly writing. the faculty panel charged with making a recommendation recommended against dismissing prof. churchill. as prof. gary leupp has suggested, if "boards of regents in this country were to investigate and punish the falsification of Native American history by scholars, or if society in general were to investigate such falsification in the media, popular culture and political discourse, we’d all be in for a very time-consuming process resulting in a whole lot of people out of jobs." the president, however, overruled the faculty's recommendation and recommended dismissal to the university's board of regents, which rubber-stamped his recommendation 8-1, with no public debate.

these attacks on the academy can't be seen separately from the ascendancy of fascism generally, including the bush administration's war on civil liberties, the erosion of institutions and laws intended to protect us from centralized power, and the increasing concentration of wealth and centralization of power, in this country and worldwide. follow my recommendation, do yourself and the world a favor, and read finkelstein and churchill.

dissertation title #36: David Lynch, or the Feminization of Alfred Hitchcock

2007-07-10T17:29:00.000-04:00

the saint, as always, proves inspirational

bruegel with buñuel

2007-06-29T10:52:00.000-04:00

[This is a visual posting of Bruegel's "The Peasant Wedding" (1568) and a still from Buñuel's Viridiana (1961). In their juxtaposition, the two images summarizes both the enjoyment of the ceremony and the impossibility of the sexual relationship that the wedding celebrates or perhaps substitutes for. This posting goes for... Anyways, they know who they are. Şerefe.]

Fridays in Bil'in

2007-06-27T13:39:00.000-04:00

(This is a very scattered posting. I am a bit fragmented, between the heat, the 6 hours of Arabic class a day, the intensity of the daily situation here, and I swear, the bumpy rides in the minibuses shake the thoughts in my brain in a way I haven’t quite adjusted to yet.)

Every Friday in the town of Bil’in residents are joined by some Israelis and other international volunteers to stand off the army. It’s a routine. The crowd marches from the mosque towards the apartheid wall chanting “laa laa l’jidar” ("No to the wall!") and waving Palestinian flags. The crowd is followed by a red crescent ambulance whose medics are equipped with water and cotton balls with vinegar to give to people overcome by tear gas. The army is waiting there outside of the town, at a point between the wall and the town. Several town leaders yell to the soldiers in Arabic and Hebrew ("Soldiers, it’s Friday, go home!"), young men and little boys gather small stones to throw towards the huge armoured jeeps, and then the tear gas starts coming, first to the sides of the road, pushing the crowd up towards the village, and then the soldiers shoot more gas into the outskirts of the village, amongst the houses. This can’t be an accident, as it is obviously in order to convince the town members, who stand steadfast every Friday with their international guests, to stop opposition to the wall. Because, they must think, if the village is gassed, maybe the villagers will start feeling like it is the activists and internationals who brought the tear gas to the village. The soldiers in jeeps and helmets advance, the crowd pushes forward, and back again, forward and back. Occasionally there is an arrest or two, and those involved are usually released several hours later--probably this is the only place in Palestine where release happens this swiftly. Eventually, the crowd disperses and there is an unspoken “see you next week” between the crowd and the soldiers.

Walking (trying not to run) towards the town, choking on the tear gas, one can’t help but wonder, why are we doing this? The back and forth, the forward and back, the advance and retreat structures that hour or so, as well as the weekly ritual. How can we understand weekly rituals like this? Is there an accumulation, besides the tear gas in peoples’ lungs, and if so, what is accumulated? It is certainly not that people expect that if they keep showing up, the soldiers just will stop.

I guess there are some easy answers; all of which are true, I think. There is some reappropriation of action, when it is the town people who are in some ways “forcing” the soldiers out, creating a confrontation when they are ready armed with words, flags, and rocks, as opposed to army incursions which occur suddenly and literally catch people with their pants down. There is a practice of making public collective resistance routine in the face of attempts to normalize the occupation, even if this is through posturing confrontation. Also, there are the relationships that are strengthened and expanded through weekly action, and that type of networking is resistance in and of itself.

But there is something else which is irksome, which begs for deeper digging. It’s that nagging feeling that there is some complacency in this action, that being arrested and released 2 hours later every week shows some sort of performance that the soldiers are a part of too.
When I came back on Friday, I watched the film “Arna’s Children” about a theatre group in Jenin, from which almost all of the young actors were eventually martyred. One young actor said something quite profound about performance, or the relationship between stage performance and demonstrations. When the interviewer asked him about the role of theatre in the Intifada, at first he mistook the question and gave this answer more or less: when he is on stage he doesn’t think of the audience and that’s how he captures people’s attention, by being fully immersed. And then when the director repeated the question to him, the boy answered straight forwardly: “On stage I feel like I am throwing stones.”

In New York, we complain snarkily that protests that are “sanctioned,” end up being a handful of leftists walking around in a pen set up by the police. This protest in Bil’in, I must admit, feels, in some ways, the same. But, I think the difference is that this weekly protest is not an exceptional once a year event against the war in Iraq, but rather it punctuates another week of occupation, full of the millions of impossibilities of life under occupation. Restricted movement, violence, poverty. Stores flooded with Israeli goods. The Zionist images on the shekel, the Israeli currency, which is used in the West Bank too. The old books in the Birzeit library--since Israel doesn’t allow the book shipments into the university. There is no way to imagine all of the banal ways in which the occupation operates at every level.

It is easy for an international to get caught in the moment of the tear gas, and feel that the occupation and resistance is enacted primarily in these weekly encounters, and to get enthralled, and to lose oneself in the moment, and to imagine that these are the Sites of Resistance. One international complained to me in the servis (the shuttle, dolmuş) on the way home that the kids throw stones, and that this somehow means that Palestinian resistance is bankrupt. To begin with, the kids throw stones at armored jeeps. And second, this conversation ("Should the kids throw stones?") presumes that the moment is ground zero, that everything started today, 20 minutes ago when prayers let out, and that it is a conflict between the kids and the tanks, as if the kids didn’t throw stones, the occupation would end, as if the occupation started because kids began throwing stones. This weekly event is a point on a long history of occupation and resistance .

Why did I think of this interview in “Arna’s Children?” Throwing stones is a practice, and it does not think of its audience. Kids who throw stones are thinking of each other likely, and trying to impress and outdo each other, and they are not tailoring their project to get international support, or Israeli mercy. And they capture people that way, in ways that challenge the people for whom protest is about results. It was a great “mistaken” response because he was expected to say something about art and resistance, and he spoke instead about self-reflection, how he feels and what he thinks when he is on stage, what is performance and who is it for? And then he related it to the act of throwing stones.

This leads to the first question again. What is this practice, what is produced through it, and who is it for?

And all of this against the backdrop of cooperation between Abu Mazen, Olmert, and the other powers that be. The release of only Fatah prisoners from Israeli prisons, Palestinian money confiscated by Israel released in stages to feed Fatah. And then, today, an Israeli incursion in Gaza worse than people have seen in so long. It still amazes me that the news can speak of an “impending humanitarian crisis,” it’s like 12 life sentences, I guess.

More soon…

Iraqi workers strike against the new Oil Law

2007-06-08T11:17:00.000-04:00

The following is an excerpt from the interview that Amy Goodman conducted with Antonia Juhasz, the author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. The interview is aired on Wednesday as the 600 pipeline workers in southern Iraq began a strike on June 5 to protest the new oil law for Iraq. You can follow the news pertaining to the Iraqi labor movement and the growing number of strikes across the country from the website of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers.

AMY GOODMAN: First, talk about this strike, Antonia.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, the strike is critical. It’s been a long time building. There had been some negotiations between the strike leaders and Prime Minister al-Maliki. There are a number of demands, basic working conditions, wages, as you say, but also a seat at the table and opposition to the attempt to turn over Iraq's oil to foreign oil corporations and the -- as more knowledge has been brought to Iraq, it’s been very difficult for Iraqis to even learn what this oil law was about, just like it’s been difficult here. As more information has spread, the opposition has spread, as well, and now the workers have taken the situation into their own hands and struck.
AMY GOODMAN: And what is this US-backed proposal?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: It’s a Bush administration, US corporate, very simple attempt to figure out: if you’re going to wage a war for oil, how do you get the oil. Does Exxon come in on a tank with a flag and stick it in the ground, or do you have a more careful process? The careful process is very simply: write a law, get a new Iraqi government in place, have the Iraqis pass the law, and then turn the oil over to US oil corporations.
The Bush administration designed the law. Last January, President Bush announced that it was a benchmark for passage by the Iraqi government. It was the same day that he announced the surge. And in the language of the administration, the surge was meant to provide the political space so that the Iraqis could discuss the oil law and other benchmarks. The Democrats then adopted this language of the benchmarks and said in the supplemental war spending bill, again, that the Iraqis have to pass this benchmark. And it very simply turns Iraq from a nationalized oil system, essentially closed to US oil corporations, to a privatized system in which potentially two-thirds of all of Iraq’s oil could be owned by foreign oil companies, and they can control the production with as long as thirty-year contracts.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, what about the news coming out of Iraq that Raed Jarrar has reported on, talking about the significance of the vote for the US to get out of Iraq by the parliament?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: It’s very significant. The United Nations mandate for the US occupation of Iraq gives ultimate authority to the Iraqi parliament and the Iraqi cabinet to determine if the occupation can continue. So, theoretically, if the Iraqi parliament, joined by the cabinet -- and that’s critical -- say that the occupation cannot continue, theoretically it would have to end. That stands in vast opposition to the plans of the Bush administration and now, apparently, the plans of the Democratic leadership, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Couldn't it give Bush an out?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: It could give Bush an out, if he wanted an out. I don't think he wants an out.
AMY GOODMAN: Because?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, I think there’s many ways in which the war is not going all bad for the President and for the administration. The only thing that’s truly going bad is the instability. But what has worked is a government in place that is more amenable to US interests than the last ten years of the Hussein regime, a government in place that is willing to negotiate in a dramatic fashion on the nature of Iraq's oil regime, and being on the precipice of a transfer of Iraq, a fundamental transfer, in its oil policy. We have US oil corporations engaging daily in negotiations with the Iraqi oil ministry, waiting on the sidelines. If the law passes, US corporations have the potential to own a true bonanza of oil and, if the US military stays, protection to get in and get it. Now --
AMY GOODMAN: Which companies, in particular?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Chevron, Exxon, Conoco, BP, Shell, Marathon.
AMY GOODMAN: Are all now working intensively with the oil ministry.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah, they absolutely are, and have been from the beginning.
AMY GOODMAN: And if they don't pass this law?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: If they don't pass the law, it’s a big strike at the heart of the agenda. I would say that the game wouldn't be over, and the fact that the administration is talking publicly about this Korea policy, the idea that the United States would maintain some sort of military presence similar to the US presence, quote/unquote, "keeping the peace between South and North Korea," that’s a permanent military engagement, which could last as long as fifty years. The thirty-year contracts, the length, the extended length of the occupation, leads me to believe that this is the idea that the administration wants to pursue.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think of this comparison?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: It’s incredibly disturbing. First of all, the conditions are completely dissimilar, except for the desire of the United States to maintain a presence and to use the misunderstanding, I think, of the American public as to the role of the US military in Korea, to say, “Well, we’ve created peace for fifty years in one situation. We can create peace for fifty years in this other situation. Oh, and by the way, our military will be really well situated to move forward across the region to spread peace across the Middle East, where, oh, by the way, there also happens to be two-thirds of the world's remaining oil.” It’s a terrifying proposition.

...it's educational!

2007-05-26T17:07:00.000-04:00

"UMass" by the Pixies

In the sleepy west of the woody east
is a valley full, full o' pioneer
we're not just kids, to say the least
we got ideas to us that's dear
like capitalist, like communist
like lots of things you've heard about
and redneckers they get us pissed
and stupid stuff it makes us shout
oh dance with me oh don't be shy
oh kiss me cunt and kiss me cock
oh kiss the world oh kiss the sky
oh kiss my ass oh let it rock
of the april birds and the may bee
oh baby
university
of massachusetts, please
and here's the last five
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational.

Health Care Reform Debate as Castration: Masculine Sexuation and Health Care Reform

2007-05-20T21:06:00.000-04:00

Part 2 of “Health Care and the Community Economy: Towards an Ethics of Surplus and Geography of Sufficiency.”

The U.S. Health care reform debate centers on the question of whether care is a right or a commodity. Do markets exclude people from access to care or does competitive pressure work to make care progressively more affordable? Could the state guarantee access to quality care for all or would a national health insurance system mean equity of misery? With stunning regularity this debate between universal health care advocates and pro-market reformers has been restaged without being resolved. It is precisely this repetitiveness that has led me to regard the health care reform debate as a social fantasy whose aim is the conservation of the subject—the maintenance of an identity that is both formed and trapped by the impasse of this debate. How does this work?

Advocates of free market reform and those who champion a right to care share a common understanding of patients and providers—as rational, utility maximizing subjects through the economistic theories of moral hazard and demand inducement—patients are infinitely needy and providers are infinitely greedy. It is this a-priori conception of the subjects of care that installs an economy of scarcity as the master signifier in health care reform discourse. It is no surprise then, that private HMOs, Medicare and Medicaid bureaucrats have simultaneously developed similar approaches to constraining patient demands and controlling costs, regulating the enjoyment of patients and providers.

My argument here is that both sides of this debate speak a language of optimized care delivery—frequently drawing upon the industrial language of total quality management—when discussing the efficacy of captitated Medicaid payments in Utah, tort reform in New York, or automated record keeping nationally. It should be kept in mind, however, that these practices of miserliness produce the scarcity they presume. What happens to us when we accept this description of patient and provider motivation?

When we accept the premises of this debate—how subjects are conceived—we enter into a symbolic order that constrains enjoyment in a particular way. If both Medicare bureaucrats and HMOs use capitation and co-payments to control costs, they are directed to do so because this debate regards reproductive labor as a social cost that must be minimized in order to conserve capital for economic growth in productive sectors. We can enjoy some “social reproduction” only so long as capitalism’s access to capital remains unconstrained and unquestioned.

[I should note in passing that the policy directed bureaucratic form of this debate has its equivalence in the popular imagination: the search to find some extraneous enjoyment, some excessive demand whose curtailment—it is believed—will restore the balance. The anti-immigrant group the Minute Man has publicly stated that illegal immigrant demand for health care is an onerous and unnecessary burden placed upon the health care system that is responsible for rising health care costs. Indeed, if one were to visit hospitals in border regions one would find confirmation of this belief. However we must bear in mind Lacan’s scandalous proposition that a husband’s jealousy is still pathological even if his wife really is cheating on him. What we need to question here is not the empirical assertion that some portion of aggregate demand for emergency health care arises in the immigrant population (legal or otherwise) but rather the belief that eliminating this demand will be sufficient to fix the problem.]

Following Özselçuk and Madra's indispensible "Psychoanalysis and Marxism" we can recognize that it is the singular exceptional status of productive capital and the subordination of the sphere of social reproduction that allows us to recognize that health care reform is carried out in relation to a masculine or dynamic logic.

“There is at least one X that is not subject to the phallic function.”
Productive capital’s access to the surplus is unconstrained because all other claims (for social welfare) are subject to castration. It is the exception that allows the rest to be subject to the law of scarcity.

“All Xs are submitted to the phallic function.”
For Lacan, as for Kant, these cosmological propositions show a limit to the law language enunciates. In masculine sexuated discourse the failure takes the form of a contradiction that is ignored. The subject emerges at this point of failure

Preferred provider networks were seen as an effective strategy to control costs until the late 1990s when patient dissatisfaction led to legislation (patients bill’s of rights) that undermined their efficacy. PPNs were a stand in for a social order, a reconciliation of contradictory demands—that failed-us. The failure of masculine logic is a failure to embody. Preferred Provider Networks failed and Medical Savings Accounts (the new solution) will fail as bureaucratic responses to the perceived economic reality of scarcity—a reality which demands that we be happy with our castration. This partially explains Uwe Reinhardt’s (see left) observation that “we will always have health care reform, and it will always fail.”

Thus, as Joan Copjec the tenents of masculine sexuation are not antinomic propositions as they appear but are simply statements that exist in a state of simple contradiction that is disavowed. It is precisely this disavowal that allows for practitioners of believe, in all sincerity, that they have arrived at the solution this time only to have it fail.

(To be continued in Part 3.)

"United States of Alzheimer's"

2007-05-18T01:04:00.000-04:00

On May 16, Studs Terkel turned 95. He is precious. You may want to listen to his interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!. The first time I taught Introduction of Political Economy at the University of Massachusetts, thanks to Steve Cohn's sound advice, I used interviews from his Working:What People do all Day and How They Feel About What They Do to illustrate and give concreteness to the various class structures (slave-labor, wage-labor, serf-labor, independent, and cooperative) within which working people participate.

A strong feeling of nostalgia towards the New Deal, to the Works Project Administration permeates the conversation. At some point, he speaks of the New Deal as an Utopian moment:

And then came the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Wallace, especially. And here came the jobs, the WPA of Harry Hopkins, Work Projects Administration. That meant work for men, for shovels -- also arts projects. There were artists and painters and dancers and singers. And this was all part of the New Deal.

In a sense, this reminded me once more that it is necessary to begin to understand what the New Deal means for the American Unconscious. Perhaps, it is the intimate alterity, the extimacy that haunts the hegemonic capitalism in the USA. The Social Security and its pay-as-you-go system is only one of the many institutional components of this American style "communism." Perhaps, it is the only one that is remaining. It was the institutional architecture (constructed by the nameless social engineers trained in the tradition of Dewey, Veblen, Commons style American pragmatism/institutionalism) of the New Deal and not necessarily post-war Keynesianism that which helped capitalism get out of the Great Depression and laid down the social technologies that enabled the petroleum-fueled post-war "Golden Age of Capitalism" (or, to borrow Tim Mitchell's terminology, carbon capitalist democracy). The extent to which these institutions are entrenched within the social formation can be gauged by the inability of the neoliberal counter-revolution to fully dislodge its key institution, the Social Security.

How does Social Security (in its pay-as-you-go version) count as a communist moment at the heart of this carbon capitalism? Simply because it enacts (as if it is a most reasonable and practical idea) the very communist axiom of "from those who can (the workers and the corporations) to those who need (the elderly, the disabled, etc.)". Without doubt, this is not a type of communism that I will be satisfied with. And, my aim is certainly not to perpetuate a new New Deal nostalgia. Yet, at the same time, when Studs Terkel complains about the social amnesia produced by the so-called "liberal" media and re-names the States as the United States of Alzheimer's (humorously modifying Gore Vidal's the United States of Amnesia), it is impossible to not to think of the strange and evasive way in which the American public relates to the New Deal.

Perhaps a half a decade ago, while cooking together with fellow blogger bigbadbull at our then Northampton ("Soviet Graves 1") residence, in the heat of the moment I claimed that Liberalism, as it is understood in the United States and perhaps best embodied in the public spirit of the New Deal, is the far most left position that one can feasibly take within the American political landscape. This is undoubtedly incorrect and the remaining portions of this posting will make it clear why it is so. Nevertheless, today, I would still insist on proposing the following modified hypothesis: The New Deal Liberalism constitutes the very frame of reference of a broadly defined American Left (and dialectically speaking the American Right). I would count the civil rights movement as an extension of the New Deal Liberalism. (So does, I think, Lars von Triers in his Manderlay, the second installment of his American trilogy). Even the radical left in the US (e.g., the new left of the Sixties), in its critique of the Soviet model, in its distance from Eurocommunism, and in its awkward relation to Maoism is the shape that the New Deal Liberalism took within the context of the Vietnam War.

In this sense, it would not be far fetched to argue that the New Deal Liberalism holds a place that is similar to the one Kemalism holds in Turkey. Not unlike the New Deal Liberalism, Kemalism determines (and truncates) the very horizon within which left operates within the broader social formation.

Nevertheless, of course, this hypothesis is bound to be proven wrong. There are social movements and political positions articulated within the past and the present of the US that breaks from and is opposed to the State-Capital-Nation knot (to use Karatani's metaphor-concept) of the United States of Alzheimer's even when its is tied together by the ideology of the New Deal Liberalism. Preceding the New Deal, there are the indigenous (or Indian and not Native American as Zizek would prefer to refer to them as, if only to demonstrate once more the stupidity of European settlers-colonialists) movements of resistance (which are themselves could be categorized as communist) against the settler colonization of the continent and, slightly later on, the Shakers who established their Yankee Communes on the basis of radical egalitarianism among genders and races—much before the North decided that it is in its benefit to do so. Again after the Civil War and before the New Deal, there are the Haymarket riots and the anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti (don't miss the recently produced documentary) who articulated a different vision of solidarity and resistance against the onslaught of capitalism. And then, there is the Black Panther Movement moving beyond the Civil Rights Movement. And then...

Perhaps the others can insert their examples of left movements within the history and the present of the US that articulated/articulates a position beyond and against the State-Capital-Nation knot—even when this knot is articulated within the idiom of the benevolent New Deal Liberalism.

A Shameful Act

2007-05-16T10:42:00.000-04:00

This is a collection of brief excerpts from a recent lecture by Taner Akçam whose A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (2007) is a good place to start to understand why the Armenian Genocide organized by the Young Turks is the link that explains the conceptual/ideological as well as institutional transition from the late 19th century social darwinian European nationalisms to the Jewish Holocaust.

Health Care and the Community Economy: Towards an Ethics of Surplus and Geography of Sufficiency. (Part 1)

2007-05-02T15:51:00.000-04:00

Introduction

In a recent presentation entitled “Freud in the Field: Some Early Twentieth Century Encounters in Participant Observation,” critical geographer Laura Cameron argued that Bronisław Kasper Malinowski’s participant observation was inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis—the productive tension it creates between engagement and reflection. Though Malinowski later repudiated psychoanalysis as a result of a controversy over the universality of the Oedipus complex it was clear that he continued to have a great personal respect for Freud.

My own encounter with the subjects of my field research was less directed by a conscious commitment to participation, observation followed by reflection (self-analysis) than it was about the way in which people I interviewed in the health care field crystallized my comprehension of the psychoanalytic theory I was exposed to in the course of our seminars from 1999 through 2004. A principal theme that emerged from my qualitative research was that care providers, from physicians to informal caregivers, shared a common experience in the labors of care:

A drive to care that we can recognize as ethical in the Lacanian sense—a non-pathological act that remakes the subject. (The key text here is Alenka Zupancic's indispensible Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (Verso, 2000).)
How attending to this act of care both involves self-transformation—and an attenuation of the boundaries between self and other in encountering the patient, a process that can threaten psychic and physical exhaustion or financial ruin in the case of informal care givers.
This common ethical drive suggests the need to reconceptualize the process of health care reform as one that focuses on the centrality of this ethical drive in a way that allows caregivers to be transformed rather than undone by their efforts.

In the process of reflecting upon the themes that emerged from my research convinced me that the Lacanian distinction between the Analytical and the University discourse enables me to differentiate health care reform as a process that pays attention to an ethics of care from the bureaucratic process of “cutting.” From the perspective of the four discourses, late Elizabeth Wright, in her Psychoanalytic Criticism (Routledge, 1999) argues that the function of language is not communication but the creation of a common bond between subjects. The adhesive power of this linguistic bond is to be found in the dis-connection between the unconscious of the agent and the addressee and not in the transmission of knowledge.

Four Discourses

It is beyond the scope of my writing here to restate once more the matheme permutations that arrange the master signifier (S1) (asserted entry point), knowledge (S2), the object-of-desire (a) and the split subject (S barré), in relation to conscious/unconscious of the agent and the conscious/unconscious of the addressee. Suffice it to say the University discourse, in its exposition of knowledge (in this case how to regulate the allocation of health care), presents itself as an objective knowledge. What is unconsciously produced in the recipients of this knowledge is ambivalent identification with what is pronounced: does this speak to my desires or thwart them? What remains inaccessible in this communication is the foundational assumption (the master signifier) which sets the rules of the knowledge production in the first place. It remains in accessible because it resides in the individual/institutional unconscious of University discourse. In contrast, the effect of the Analytic discourse possesses the potential to dislocate this foundational assumption as the unconscious knowledge of the analyst unfolds in the course of the analysis.

I cannot claim to have fully incorporated the four discourses into my work, methodologically or analytically, but I have been inspired by others to think about the implications of their political significance. It strikes me that Yannis Stavrakakis’s (see his upcoming The Lacanian Left) approach is to see in the Analytical discourse the basis for formalizing radical democratic politics. My dear friend Ken Byrne sees in the Analytic discourse a topographical space in which we view the object (in his case, the education reform) from a different perspective—having traversed the fantasy that emerges as a consequence of University discourse’s failure to fully capture the subject or to justify its unconscious assumptions and beyond the hysterical objection, we arrive at the possibility of a new organization of the problematic (a new master signifier).

In examining health care reform discourse—spilling out in a flood of academic and policy press—it became obvious to me that that an economy of scarcity was the master signifier that informed all efforts at health care reform. Further, the failure to domesticate or contain the effects of this scarcity produced an ambivalent subject whose protestations formed the basis for the further enunciation of the University discourse of health care reform—just as Lacan argued that hysteria constitutes the basis for the further advancement of knowledge (Lacan Seminar XVII). In listening to this “knowledge” in relation to health care reform, what emerge are both its repetitive quality as well as those moments where it is clear that we might look at things in a decidedly different way. It is here that a methodological approach to qualitative research can be usefully compared with the analytic process. There are moments in the course of research—both archival and in interview—where this alternative perspective emerges as a clear and coherent alternative. One such moment was in watching an interview the Bernard Leitaer recorded by Ted White and Karen Warner in the summer of 2006. While watching this interview I had a moment where someone else clarified perfectly what I had been attempting to formalize in the course of my research and writing. Bernard Leitaer allowed me to see an approach to health care reform that is located beyond an economy of scarcity as a foundational assumption.

Bernard Lietaer is one of the principal architects of the euro and a prominent player in international currency markets. He has recently become interested in alternative currency systems, especially mutual credit systems like the Akipu in Japan which allows for adult children to accumulate credits by caring for older adults near their home and then transfer these credits to their parents in need of care to be redeemed through someone else’s efforts in the system. One should take note that this is a system where the capacity to care expands as more people participate in the exchange network. It is a system of care that aims at a sufficient response to the growing problems of an aging population. Lietaer argues sufficiency, not abundance or excess, is the true opposite of scarcity. Rather than being its simple negation, it describes a different relation between necessity, limits and capacity. The limit remains but it is experienced differently—its status is indeterminate rather than given a-priori. Looking at health care reform from the perspective of an indeterminate limit—it is possible to see the Akipu system as a limited response to elder care whose potential sufficiency grows as more people participate in this alternative system of production and exchange. It might create the conditions for cooperative relations of production and ethical relations of exchange called for in the conclusion of Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique.

This is the relationship with the process of health care reform that we need, but I am getting ahead of myself.

(To be continued in Part II)

The Testimonies of Azmi and Hrant

2007-05-01T14:26:00.000-04:00

"One of the difficulties in discussing violence in the 1948 war is that “Palestine,” the site of violence, both persists and has ceased to exist. Its simultaneous presence and erasure occurs in part through the survival of Palestinians from the 1948 war in what has ceased to be Palestine. Their scattered yet persistent presence constitutes a thread with which one can return to that moment when Palestine was ruined. They embody the survival of Palestine, yet also stand for its death. This death continues both to impede their memory of what has happened in 1948 and to structure it. The memories of the Palestinian survivors constitute a challenge to another kind of thread (mis)leading us back to 1948. The war also resulted in a birth—of a new Jewish state attempting to deny the simultaneous death that gave rise to its creation."
"1948: Law, History, Memory" by Samera Esmeir

I cannot help but make the connection here between Azmi and Hrant Dink, as survivors who pose a challenge by naming this connection, and really the necessity of the connection, between the death and birth. They do so in such a way that exposes as ridiculous those who try to blur the connection in order to maintain current (dis)order.

I was brought to this by c-blok’s writings, and by reading through pages and pages of writings on the Armenian genocide, some of them replete with so many forms of denial that resonate intensely with the Zionist denials of the Nakba. In his The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922, economic historian Donald Quataert writes that one of the main reasons why this is said to be genocide is that Armenians “died because of their identity, not because of their actions and beliefs” (185). He says this by way of introducing why he does not think it can be called genocide, why it was different than the Nazi genocide of Jews. I wonder, in what ways? How is it possible to divorce identity from actions and beliefs?

He locates the beginning of the problems, where “the story begins,” in 1914 with Russian Armenians who come along with other Russian invaders through the eastern Anatolian front. This follows an entire book which actually quite carefully and thoroughly maps the various ways in which Ottoman identities were formed over centuries, and changed and disrupted suddenly with the Tanzimat. In this way, we can see how the story begins much earlier in fact, in the way that Armenian identity, not just as a national identity but as an identity of the second largest millet in the Ottoman Empire, made them the exact targets for actions focused on cleansing and consolidating, incidental only insofar as the people killed were bodies that incidentally belonged to that identity. This is the same with Jews in the Nazi holocaust and Hannah Arendt does a very nice job showing this in The Origins of Totalitarianism by looking at how the Jew (rather than the Jews) played a very specific and very complex role in commerce and in social relations in Europe, and that it is not a coincidence that the “liberation” of the Jew ultimately led to the destruction of the Jew.

Quataert reports that in Istanbul and Izmir the Armenian communities “remained intact and in place, going about their business” (186) while the massacres were conducted in the East, i.e. that the absence of large-scale massacres in Istanbul and Izmir cancel out the massacres in the East. This is a position also taken by Zionist denialists, saying that some Arabs (Palestinians) did not leave (weren’t expelled from) their homes in 1948, and that some were even saved by Jews! This ugly rhetoric asserts that the exceptions prove the rule, and that if there was no killing of bodies, or rather, if all bodies were not killed, then a genocide did not take place.

What is similar in both situations, and why the term genocide is apt, is that the mass killing was not just the murder of people, but an effort to eradicate Armenian or Palestinian identity as such, so that those who remained would not be Armenian or Palestinian. The presence of Armenians in Turkey or the presence of Palestinians in Israel highlights this: as identities which experienced the genocide through survival, that is, a survival which became an extension of the genocide, their presence becomes a testimony. But a testimony to what?

The presence and the testimony of Hrant Dink and of Azmi Bishara stand both for survival and death, and this is precisely how genocide functions. It is not just the killing of people, as though that would not be enough, but more so, the structuring of that killing, not because it is premeditated or it uses modern technology, but because it is designed to kill an identity in order to make way for another. We are supposed to believe in the compassion of Zionism and/or Kemalism because it “allowed” for some Palestinians or Armenians to live, and even to stay in their home territories, but even those few who got to stay in the same house, were de-territorialized in a way that was just as violent. The process was to expel some out of their homes, and for the others, to expel their homes out of them, to make them strangers in themselves(as Azmi writes in his recent LA Times editoria l: “When Israel was established in 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in fear. My family was among the minority that escaped that fate, remaining instead on the land where we had long lived. The Israeli state, established exclusively for Jews, embarked immediately on transforming us into foreigners in our own country.”), to disorient them in such a way that it is not clear what home or identity even mean, and then to have them serve as the proof that genocide did not occur.

The power and the threat of Hrant Dink and of Azmi Bishara, and of all of the Armenians in Turkey and Palestinians in Israel, is that they refuse to be that proof, that they transform that survival from an individual bodily survival to a collective resistance.

The expansive politics of Azmi Bishara and Emily Jacir

2007-04-27T17:34:00.000-04:00

In his recent book-manifesto, Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière refers to citizen's rights as the "rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not." Politics is sparked within the interval of this contradiction as the 'have nots' defy, through political practice, the arbitrary deprivation of the rights that they have. This is at least how I understand Rancière's attempt to politicize the citizenship discourse and recover its radical dimension that is lost in the hands of both its critics and advocates.

The critics' apathy emanates from a certain circular deadlock that they think to inhere in the rights discourse: by its very definition, human rights are the rights of those (or for those) who have no rights. Conceived this way, rights discourse delivers nothing but a mere tautology. On the other hand, the advocates, in regarding the universality of the rights discourse as self-evident, remain oblivious to the internal exclusions that particularize the latter within the citizenship practices.

For Rancière, then, both advocates and critics would obfuscate the site of the political by sidestepping the divisibility of rights. That is, they would overlook the ways in which a new subjectivity could be established through countering the internal exclusions of the rights discourse via holding it accountable to its very pronouncements. Perhaps, it is the bringing into existence of this political site in the context of Israel that gives Azmi Bishara's position its profound uniqueness. (Thanks to entropy, the destroyer and viola swamp for acquainting me with Bishara and the wonderful documentary, I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara by Ariella Azoulay.)

From 1996 until his recent resignation, Bishara has been a member of the Israeli parliament (Knesset) and the key founder of the political party, the National Democratic Assembly (NDA-Balad), represented by 3 (now 2) seats in the 120 member Knesset. Bishara's controversial position stems from his persistence in pointing out the divorcement of the Israeli citizenship from its declaration, an exercise that violently figures in the denial of citizenship rights to the Israeli Arabs and Palestinians who have them. Rather than advocating for a separate nation-state for the Palestinians, Bishara and his party have insisted on reclaiming what they already have, Israeli citizenship.

In this sense, Bishara's position not only compels the Israeli state to face up to its disavowal of the principles of citizenship, and, hence, the intimate self-annihilation that resides at the core of its identity. It also restores the universalizing aspiration to the principle of citizenship against the process of the latter's privatization and particularization through the formation of ever newer nation-states. It is dire, and, unfortunately, not so surprising, that Zionism's anxious reaction to Bishara's position has been to clamp down on the Arab minority, the "enemy within." His recent resignation and exile come as a result of this increasing assault.

***

The photograph below by the diaspora/Palestinian artist Emily Jacir is entitled Bank Mirror, Ramallah. I do not know what makes this image so intriguing to me. I cannot but keep looking at it. Maybe, because I have grown so accustomed to associating Palestine with images of beige streets that look like war trenches, a wall-torn stony landscape punctuated with naked dwellings. Does this image remind me that there are actually banks in Palestine, which somehow 'function', that there is a modern urban life in shambles?

Or is this art work captivating because of the way in which it positions itself? That is, the way in which it does not forefront, frame, or try to carve out a space for itself, a separate realm for art, but rather merges with the social field of Palestine, letting itself "disappear" within what it offers: in Susan Buck-Moss' description of public art, "a protective exposure," "a safe place in the public sphere" for the unspeakable truths. In a sense, there is a certain innocence to the image that, in its refusal to deliver the familiar representation of 'the enemy', snatches the enjoyment of the reactionary common sense. After all, the image does not portray an easily identifiable Subject of resistance in revolt, but rather a shattering effect of the occupation that remains ineffable.

But what is this effect, the unspeakable truth within which this art work dissolves? Is the shattered mirror a witness to, an almost perfect reflection of the fact that there is nothing left anymore in Palestine to represent (or representable in some meaningful way), say, apart from its completely destroyed public life and its mutilated past? I want to suggest that what the image disseminates exceeds this realist and desolate insinuation. The image embodies a dimension of desacralizaton, destablization, a process of emptying out fantasies (how would the 'holy lands' of Israel reflect in this mirror? how would a Zionist appear in this mirror?) even though such a desacralizing aspect emerges as an effect of a violence imposed on a population.

Yes, the image does not offer a resolution; it does not guide a way out of the apartheid violence. Yet, the image does not quite close off onto itself; its cracks render palpable the impossibility of making essentializing identity claims on this geography. Maybe, it is the void and the cracks of the Palestine-Israeli social formation that this image moves toward. Elaboration of the politics of void, which, in part, is inspired by xurban collective's reconceptualization of art as archeology, is left for other surplus thoughts.

Iraq oil and its colonial pre-history

2007-04-22T16:45:00.000-04:00

I remembered some years ago talking in class about the US-led plans of privatization in Iraq at the beginning of the Occupation. From what I recall, Bremer even had a timeline for selling off the state-owned oil firm. At the time, it was roundly criticized by neighboring countries (surprise, surprise), and i think the plan was indefinitely delayed. Does anyone know any more about this? I tried looking this up, and there is so little I could find, that I am starting to wonder if I didn't make it all up.

It is worthwhile to use this inquiry by maliha to step back and recall the colonial pre-history of the regime of extraction of oil in Iraq. The story goes all the way back to a late Ottoman entrepreneur Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian who established the Turkish Petroleum Company in 1912 as a consortium of the European oil companies (Royal Dutch, British Shell, Anglo-Persian Oil Company, etc.) for the exploration and the extraction of oil in the Ottoman territories of Iraq. Gulbenkian, since he always retained a five percent of the shares of the oil concessions he organized, was also known as "Mr. Five Per Cent".

After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the British took control of the Iraqi territories and in 1929 the Turkish Petroleum Company became the Iraq Petroleum Company. The largest shareholder of the consortium, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company will later (in 1954) change its name to British Petroleum. IPC maintained his monopoly position until 1961 when General Abd al-Karim Qasim nationalized almost all the concession areas in Iraq.

In a recent analysis published in ZNet, Munir Chalabi argues that the new oil law is "the old concessionary model in a new guise" giving all sorts of privileges to International Oil Companies and thereby marginalizing the role of Iraqi National Oil Company.

In the past two weeks, there were a number of protests around the world against International Oil Companies (e.g., against BP in UK and against Chevron in SF) warning them to keep their hands off the Iraqi oil. Indybay.org summarizes the current situation with respect to the new oil law:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki endorsed the draft law February 26, it was approved by the Iraqi cabinet in March, and the law is waiting for a vote in the Iraqi Parliament.

Without doubt, this does not substitute for a comprehensive analysis of the situation. Yet it is useful to keep this historical perspective in mind when trying to make sense of the current reconfiguration of the regime of appropriation and extraction of Iraqi oil.

Saint ymM

this man from poland wearing strange glasses

2007-04-12T23:43:00.000-04:00

In lieu of a significant post on David Lynch, and the future (and/or death) of cinema...this is what is on offer:

"A great unified field."

It is only the transcendental meditation of David Lynch that makes me not believe in him being the greatest filmmaker of all time.

Follow this link to hear more from Lynch himself:
http://download.yousendit.com/C4D567C320933415

His utter conviction in the unity of all ideas (or "big fish" as he likes to call them) should disturb us all. But fear not. David Lynch, like all of us, has an unconscious. He knows not what he does.

Lynch on Texture:
http://download.yousendit.com/C2DEA7333A95ECD4

Lynch on Digital Video:
http://download.yousendit.com/E6F8F17961DE7054

Lynch on the death of film:
http://download.yousendit.com/2B9EBF2138CEC43E

*Note: all audio files are taken from David Lynch's book "Catching the Big Fish"

More commentary to follow...

A non-all David Lynch

2007-04-08T13:02:00.000-04:00

Unfortunately, perhaps due to the general difficulty in accessing to a screening of Inland Empire, the contributors of this list were not able to engage in a conversation on Lynch's latest installment of his post-noir non-all cinema. In any case, from its use of digital camera to its commerically suicidal 3hrs long non-narrative "plot", the movie is a big "fuck you" to the Hollywood system. Well, let's now pay attention to what Lynch himself thinks about the commericalization of cinema:

[Many thanks to Jared who brought this clip to my attention.]

A conference: Histories and alternatives within and beyond zionism [excerpt from Ryvka's talk]

2007-03-04T01:07:00.000-05:00

...During the period of destabilization in the late 19th century when the Jews of Europe were being “emancipated,” Zionism was added into an economy of ideas circulating in Europe; ways of thinking about people through racial categories, ways of thinking about the superiority of those who colonize, and thinking of Jews as parasitic, un-modern, passive and unproductive. Zionism was a part of this circulation, and so while Zionism in and of itself may not have been the most popular idea at first, its adoption of the language of the times inserted it into an economy where these ideas could pick up value and meaning by their compatibility with other ideas of the time. Zionism provided a new lexicon and a new framework through which those who identified as Jews could understand their realities.

This is the economy of Zionism, this circulation of ideas and the accumulation of value, growing and morphing with people’s investments. And in this economy of language and meaning, material threats, the real threats of anti-Semitic violence at the time, played a surplus role in Zionism. It is not as though Zionism produced anti-Semitism, nor did it come about only because of anti-Semitism (Zionism was not necessary because of anti-Semitism as some would have us believe). Rather anti-Semitic violence was transformed by the meaning making of Zionism as events that should be read as justifications of it. Zionism appropriated those moments of anti-Semitic violence....

Most ludicrous question of the evening: "Isn't it only because of Zionism's success that you are even able to be here speaking?"

Most ludicrous comments:
Questioner: "Do you actually believe there is such a thing as Palestinians?"
Ryvka: "Yes. Who do you think was in Palestine before the Zionists arrived?"
Questioner: "Christians and Arabs"

A post-colonial post-card

2007-02-19T13:32:00.000-05:00

The image above is the front of a postcard that I received in the mail a couple of weeks ago--presumably, even though I don't speak the language, I am on a mailing list of potential Arabic speakers due to my name ("Yahya" for those of you don't know).

When I received this post-card, I could not help but feel the weight of the interpellation over my shoulders. It does not only invite me to help "this country" but also myself. $10,000 bonus and an expedited US citizenship is the price that the US Army Inc. deemed appropriate for recruiting collaborators ("native informants") for the new imperial project of the US.

In this sense, this post-card immediately reminded me of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) and its matter-of-fact description of the business of colonialism. But it also reminded me of Joseph Losey's Kafkaesque Mr. Klein (1976) in which, a Robert Klein, an art deal who ruthlessly profits from the situation of the Jews under the Nazi occupied France, one day receives a Jewish newsletter on mail. Fearing that he would be marked as a Jew in the eyes of the authorities, Mr. Klein himself goes to the authorities to complain that there must be a mistake, that there must be another Robert Klein. Of course, this naive attempt at refusing to be the addressee of the newsletter will only lead to his further entrapment in the subject position of the Jew.

This "Arabic Translators Needed" post-card replicates the same gesture of naming in a different context: the identification/marking of the subjects with an ethnicity through their name. Without doubt, there are differences... In one case, the destination is the concentration camps; in the other, it is the colonial outpost. In one case, the subject is summoned to be annihiliated; in the other, the subject is summoned to be deployed in the colonial administration of Iraq. Yet, in both cases, a set of subjects are summoned to come forth. And in this precise sense, it does not matter if the subject who receives the post-card is an Arabic speaker or not. Just as it did not matter for Mr. Klein that he is coming from an established old Catholic family. What matters is the institutional weight of the act of naming--which arrives sometimes in the form of a thin newsletter, sometimes in the form of a even thinner post-card, and sometimes in the form of a weightless email...

Where you get to depends on how you travel

2007-02-12T19:13:00.000-05:00

[i found this film review quite fascinating and decided to post here with the author's permission.]

Half Moon – Bahman Ghobadi
(Iran 06) viewed RotterdamFilm festival 2 Feb 2007

Bahman Ghobadi is a filmmaker who is making films from within the people. He is not an outsider coming into a culture or a society and then making a movie about the people and their problems. Movies made by outsiders rarely amount to more than a series of superficial glosses impressions and images stitched together with themes derived from either character or issues (cf In this World – Winterbottom). Films made by incomer directors usually say more about the director’s concerns than the society. Ghobady is of the Kurds. Half Moon is about them and him and it’s a simply shot road movie in which every sequence is informed by understanding of the Kurdish situation. The shots in the film represent not just images and impressions but the complex matrix of the Kurdish people and their lives. It is a film not so much about issues or problems but rather about music as a condition of a people.

In Half Moon the bus carrying the musicians is a dynamic vehicle that opens up the relationship between a people and the historical and geographical vectors that contain and shape their destiny. In the West the road movie usually engages with character and forced situational encounters that typically resolve through violence. Perhaps this is because there is nowhere for us to go in the literal geographic sense; for us the psychic fulcrum of the journey tends to pivot on an inner vector such as identity quest. In Half Moon the travelling musicians have no doubts about who are. The questions posed by Ghobadi revolve about an overcoming, a refusal to permit the world to corrupt spirit. In Half Moon the old master musician charters a bus totake him and his sons from Iran to Iraq. They undertake a journey from one country that does not exist. Iranian Kurdistan, to get to another country that does not exist, Iraqi Kurdistan, in order to participate in a large Kurdish music festival. To make the journey they have to cross political religious cultural and social fault lines that deny the legitimacy of their people their journey and their music. The master musician has spent months ensuring that he has all the correct travel permits, passports that will be needed to negotiate the complex series of barriers that will impede their progress.

Ghobady’s film is a road movie that is actually on the road. Its strength is that in order to progress, the musicians have to engage in a continuous discoursewith the worlds through which they are travelling. In effect Half Moon is a discourse: with landscape; with social fabric of life; with the religious; with the geopolitical divisions of the land. The landscapes are overwhelming in the film, shimmering realities that suggest an absorption of individual subjectivities into their vastness. The land is a powerful presence: but it’s a presence not an image. The landscapes are not beautiful celluloid backcloths against which a story unfolds. They are, ‘in the story’, at the heart of the film’s discourse. Half Moon begins in the bright sun of Iranian Kurdistan and ends in the mountainous snow vistas of Turkey. In this final sequence, what remains of the little group of musicians tries to pass over the snow covered heights of Turko-Iraqi border. As the master musician ploughs through the snow we understand something about landscape: that it is of the earth and we are part of it. The snow is a harsh environment and in its whiteness spreads across the visual field effacing all referents other than itself. As it overpowers it becomes an embrace of death. A death that is in the end accepted and even welcomed: are turn to a primary union with the earth for which there is a longing and a belonging. And this is neither sentimental nor romantic: it is simply the consequence of the spirit taking certain decisions in particular circumstances. The landscapes are, ‘in the story’, at the heart of the film’s discourse. The landscapes are an evocation, a calling up of a history that is happening as the bus moves on its journey. The landscapes are crisscrossed and marked out by invisible hidden lines that represent clan religious social and political boundaries and borders. Each landscape has a menacing aspect and in their hidden folds they are guarded and policed by men with guns who enforce the integrity of these imaginary lines by force.

One motif running through the film is the search by the master musician for a female singer. The female voice is the soul of his music and without it his music is incomplete. The female singer whom he had arranged to sing with them is unable to accompany them because of events in the natural world - severe floods have disrupted the life in her village. For the master, the female and the male are conjoined when they come together to play and sing. In the moment of playing and performing they are in complete communion. But in the non Kurdish fundamentalist religious culture the female is absent: contained constrained and bound tightly about with the male injunction to be invisible. The female is missing from public life; where she should be, there is simply a hole, a not being there. The female in public is undermined in two ways. Through public censor and opprobrium herself confidence is destroyed, and lacking self belief through she is unable to find her voice. Should the female retain self belief and assert her right to sing in public she may be assailed from without by the sentinels of religious policing who suspicious of public performance by women and intolerant of musical interaction between men and women, forcibly intervene to prevent such occurrences. The reality of this culture is that woman are absent from many fields and Half Moon is a psychical discourse into the consequences of this suppression, not just for the musicians but for the culture.

The bus follows an ever more demented and circuitous passage across Iran Turkey and Turkmenistan in its attempts to find a way across the forbidden borderlands. As they crisscross the land they pass through the villages of the country, the musicians get off the bus for tea and to talk to the villagers. And it becomes apparent that in this land the only people you see are old men. Everyone you see is old and bent. The women (young and old) are absent; and the young men are not there. Some force has rounded them up like steers and taken them to another place. The country is full of absence. Where there should be people they are not there.

The bus on its tortuous route runs into check points and road blocks all manned by young men. It seems clear that all the young men have been appropriated by the state and given Kalashnikovs to intimidate and kill. There is a process of brutalisation in play in which guns have replaced musical instruments in the stream of life. The sounds in currency are the crack of the gun and the thud and ricochet of the bullet.

The integrity of Ghobady and his musicians make this a film of the affirmation of spirit. Half Moon is not vacuous feel good road movie; it is a film that affirms faith in spirit and vision. The music in the film is wonderful. In itself it is a force that asserts its right to have a central place in the world. It can meet oppression, death, meanness of spirit with a call to joy to which the organised forces of destruction have no means of resisting. The political regimes will come and go, religious fanaticism will rise and fall. Music like the landwill persevere.

Adrin Neatrour

Adrin Neatrour is a film maker, producer and editor living and working in New Castle. Information on some of his films, which have been shown in various different festivals throughout the world, can be obtained at http://www.crinklecut.co.uk/.

The Purloined War

2007-02-10T23:31:00.000-05:00

[An image of stylish Lebanese youths driving through a Beirut neighborhood devastated by Israeli bombing, taken by U.S. photographer Spencer Platt, won the World Press Photo of the Year award, the jury announced Friday. The image contrasts a group of friends against a background of the wreckage of a collapsed building. Tellingly, one woman grimaces as she uses her mobile phone to send a text message to a friend, while another, wearing sunglasses, covers her nose with a handkerchief. The award, which Platt took while working for photo agency Getty Images, is considered one of the most prestigious for photojournalists. The photo was taken on Aug. 15, the first day of a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, as thousands of Lebanese began returning to their homes. The chairman of the jury, Michele McNally of the New York Times, described the shot as ''a picture you can keep looking at...It has the complexity and contradiction of real life, amidst chaos. This photograph makes you look beyond the obvious."]

A captivating picture, indeed. The contrast is so striking, viewers can be excused for suspecting it is two different images superimposed. Actually, it would make a very nice illustration for the dictionary entry, 'class'. The driver-bys are positively irritating in their conspicious "otherwordliness". They remind me of a scene from L'Haine where the shiftless suburban kids yell out to the reporters exploring the neighborhood timidly from within their car, "Come out here, this ain't fucking safari!". That being said, there is more --in a sense "less"-- to this picture than the "contrasts and contradictions" of the Lebanese society; there is an element the picture hides despite fully exhibiting it...namely the war, or better put, the Israeli invasion. The picture obliterates this reality, all the while using it as a backdrop. In effect, a foreign armed aggression is displaced onto a domestic class conflict. There is no denying that class (understood here in the income/wealth sense) affects one's life chances; but it is unfortunate that this observation should come at the expense of the fact that just a couple days ago, at this very site, nothing was a bigger threat to life than Israeli bombing. The picture, however, makes you forget this reality; the background might very well be a scene of an earthquake. And I'm not ascribing the photographer any intentions here. For me, the picture succeeds for a reason presumably he never intended --that is, the Purloined Letter-like occlusion it creates in relation to the war. And in that regard, I think my aesthetics and politics part ways in the case of this picture.

Events in NYC, Toronto, Montreal, Oxford, London, and Cambridge!

2007-02-05T22:51:00.000-05:00

Samuel Eliot Morison, a historian, a civilizer, a ship

2007-01-25T09:32:00.000-05:00

Ok, I'm going to tell this story backwards.

See if you have the patience to get through to the beginning.

There is or was, as of 2002 a ship in the Turkish navy called "Gokova." Now, the ship had been decommissioned from the U. S. Navy, and during its previous life it was named the U. S. S. Samuel Eliot Morison.

The Morison had been in the U. S. Navy from 1980--it had been built in the Bath, Maine shipyards in the late 70s. Among other weaponry, the Morison, a guided missile frigate, boasted a missile launcher and a rapid firing gun. During its time in the U. S. Navy, it was on various missions in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. Among other things, it was involved in several drug bust operations during which time it seized narcotics.

The ship was named for Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison. Perhaps to some of you, this name may be familiar. If you've ever read any U. S. maritime history, it should. Also, if you've ever read any histories of colonial New England, once again it will likely be a familiar name.

Morison was perhaps one of the most famous historians of the twentieth century. He was a professor of History at Harvard for over 40 years; in addition to his own voluminous writing, he trained many of the subsequently famous scholars doing American history. His books--especially on maritime history--became best sellers. He won numerous awards and honors, including 2 Pulitzer Prizes and 2 Bancroft Prizes (given to historians). In writing his famous book on Columbus, Morison took to the the seas himself, refitting a boat and making Columbus's routes and ports of call the basis of some of his research.

During World War II, Morison was appointed the Official Historian of the U. S. Navy by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Morison went on to write a 15-volume work about U. S. Naval Operations during the war. He attained his rank in the Navy from these efforts, though he also saw active duty during his time as the Navy's Historian. In 1961, Morison won the Emerson-Thoreau Medal for "distinguished literary achievement." from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1964, Morison won the Presidential Medal of Freedom "as one of the great Americans whose life and works have made freedom stronger for all of us in our time." The medal was given to him by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He was, also, Harvard's official historian, writing several different works, including a 3-volume text called "Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636-1936."

When he died in 1976 (at the age of 88), he was regarded as perhaps the most influential historian in an American University during the 20th century. One review of a collected book of his essays after his death waxed eloquent about Morison's status as THE "master historian."

Why mention any of this? Here's why. In preparing for my course this semester on American Economic History, I decided to do some reading I had long avoided on the wars between the New England colonies and the Native Americans in the 17th century. Most importantly, I decided to read extensively on "King Philip's War," a war that has been described as the most destructive, in terms of numbers of people killed per thousand of the population (and this goes for both white colonists and natives), of any war ever fought by "Americans" on or off American soil. It is notorious on many accounts, not the least of which is the fact that the tribes that "lost" were subjected to extermination, slavery (being sold off to the West Indies), and outright ruin.

Now, the first "modern" book on this war was written by Douglas Edward Leach, a Harvard Ph.d. and a professor at Vanderbilt, at least when the book was published. The book was first published in 1958 under the title "Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip's War." It has been described as the first and most complete history of the conflict written by a modern historian. All present books on King Philip's War pay homage to this book and use it freely, even when more contemporary writers diverge from Leach in his narrative and conclusions. Leach tells us that the impetus for writing the book was Morison. Indeed, he says in his Preface to the book that "it was [Morison] who convinced me that this book should be written; his inspiration and example lie behind every page." Leach was a student of Morison, and he explains that his interest in the subject was first stimulated in Morison's seminar at Harvard.

In fact, Morison was so important to the book that he wrote the Introduction for it. This is what I want to share with you. Each and every word that Morison wrote in support of Leach's own, justly famous, study. Please keep in mind who Morison was and also the probable year of this Intro's composition (1958):

"My friend Dr. Leach has written the first comprehensive history of King Philip's War to appear since the seventeenth century. Most historians, including myself, believe that it was the most severe of all the colonial Indian wars, subsequent to the 1622 massacre in Virginia. In view of our recent experiences of warfare, and of the many instances today of backward peoples getting enlarged notions of nationalism and turning ferociously on Europeans who have attempted to civilize them, this early conflict of the same nature cannot help but be of interest. It was an intensely dramatic struggle, decisive for the survival of the English race in New England, and the eventual disappearance of the Algonkian Indians.

Behind King Philip's War was the clash of a relatively advanced race with savages, an occurrence not uncommon in history. The conquering race (and this is as true of the Moslems and Hindus as of Christians) always feels duty-bound to impose its culture upon the native; the native in the process of absorbing it acquires the conquerer's vices and diseases as well, and in the end is either absorbed or annihilated, the only compromise being a miserable existence on a 'reservation.' The Algonkian Indians of New England, notably King Philip's father Massasoit, welcomed the Englishmen as an ally against their Indian neighbors and appreciated his tools and firearms; but the Englishman expected them to take the whole of his culture, including Puritan theology, in one package. That was like expecting a Stone Age savage to be at home in a modern skyscraper apartment. The New England colonists tried hard to be fair and just to the natives; but their best was not good enough to absorb them without a conflict.

Dr. Leach has told how and why this particular war happened; he has related the story of it, with all its desperate massacres, battles, and strategems. He gives a vivid picture of the conditions under which it was fought, and of the protagonists--Governor Winslow, Captain Church, Captain Moseley, Ninigret, Weetamoo the Squaw Sachem, Pomham, Monoco, and King Philip himself. He has described the tactics and the logistics by which the redskin was finally conquered. He has pulled no punches in his story of cruelty and vengeance on both sides; and the modern reader will discern many analogies to recent events. The treatment of the converted "praying" Indians was no worse than that of the United States to Japanese-Americans in World War II. The Reverend John Eliot pointed out that the harsh policy of killing prisoners or selling them into slavery would prolong the Indian war--an early instance of 'unconditional surrender.' When emotions are stimulated to the boiling point, as they are in desperate wars, Christians forget their religion and descend to the level of the brute fighting for his life. This is not only a military but a political and social history. The tactics and weapons of 1675 are of historical interest; but the policies and attitudes of Puritan and Indian are just as alive today, and as relevant, as those of World War II, or of the Peloponnesian War as described by Thuycidides."

The final touch is fitting. What better way to finish such a prologue than a refined gesture to the "birthplace" of western civilization and referencing, through the name of Thuycidides, the great literature and learning that has come with it.

I should add that one friend of Morison had described him as a man of great gentility. Indeed.

Jamar

Hrant Dink's solitude

2007-01-19T23:59:00.000-05:00

Hrant Dink, an Armenian editor, columnist, journalist, thinker from Turkey is assassinated yesterday. Within left progressive and pro-democratic forces in Turkey, Dink occupied a unique place. His perseverance, especially, in the face of the travesty of unending court trials and delusory accusations he was subjected to, more recently under the infamous Article 301, evokes an admiring and a guilty puzzlement. Unfortunately, it is Dink's loss that compels this state of puzzlement into a deliberation of the immense significance and singularity his position embodied.

Dink struggled against the nationalist denialism around the Armenian genocide and discrimination of Armenian community in Turkey (whose numbers dwindled to something between 50.000-80.000). However, he refrained from simply advocating "positive rights" for the Armenians, an approach that he argued to have led to the isolation of the Armenian community as a minority that needs (international) protection. Rather, he assumed a "negative rights" approach, meaning, he revealed the exclusions of Turkish citizenship at the same time that he engaged in practices of constituting the excluded Armenian community as citizens of Turkey. By remarking on the general precariousness of rights in Turkey, he also pointed to the shakiness of the majority/minority distinction. I think such interventions universalized Dink's position beyond the defense of Armenian rights to addressing more broadly the important issue of rethinking of citizenship in Turkey.

With equal commitment, Dink critiqued the politics of ressentiment that continues to structure the Armenian identity. He was at times critiqued by certain tendencies within the Armenian community, the religious institution of Patriarchy in Turkey as well as by the Armenian state and segments of diaspora. His nuanced stances were regarded too controversial or wrongly equated to the assimilation of the Armenian identity. Thus, on the one hand, his position was not quite fully embraced and remained inarticulate. On the other hand, he was tortured at the hands of Turkish nationalism for "denigrating and insulting Turkishness," and, eventually, eliminated. This solitude of Hrant Dink attests to the fact that he was the voice and living practice of some truth, which was hard to assume and digest, but all the more necessary not to be lost.

In the aftermath of the killing, the politico-legal-military state apparatus in Turkey circulates the memorized narratives of condemnation and condolence. Military general Yaşar Büyükanıt's awaited statement, "today's bullets were targeted to Turkey," finds its reflection in the familiar rhetoric of the prime minister, Tayyip Erdoğan, "the dark hands that killed him will be found and punished." These soulless declarations shoulder each other to reduce Dink's murder to an affair of national security, at the same time, repressing and subtracting the responsibilities of the establishment from its eventuating. They forestall the acute need to understand why this event happened. Performing a feigned remorse, they try to suppress the obscene fact that it was only a few days ago that Dink himself was ruthlessly attacked as being part of those dark forces, for allegedly threatening national unity and solidarity.

Clearly, the "Turkey" that the nationalist state ideology imagines to be targeted by yesterday's bullets has nothing in common with Dink's understanding of "Turkey." This is the reason why he is murdered. This is the reason why he walked the courts for three years before his first acquittal from the charges of insulting "Turkishness," because he defined himself in some conference in 2002 as being "not a Turk, but from Turkey and Armenian."

Dink's claim inspires a notion of citizenship, whose attachment is to a certain place and geography, rather than to a pure identity. Yet, there is also a certain understanding of historical attachment that flows through such a material space, which Dink did not want let go of. This history, though, does not correspond to a recuperation and keeping alive some lost (Armenian) ideal. Indeed, while Dink claimed that he was an Armenian and from Turkey, and while he fervently criticized the Turkish official history, he also repeated the need to detach the Armenian identity from the weight of historical memory, the "residues of the past," and, instead, refocus on the living Armenian community.

Reading Dink's claim "being from Turkey and an Armenian" might also call forth another historico-spatial imagination of Turkey, more properly, of Anatolia, as 'the mosaic of cultures,' a prevalent multiculturalist idea of citizenship that both progressive and conservative thinking at times embrace as an alternative to the ethnocentricism of Turkish nationalism. In this ideology, Turkish citizenship encompasses many different cultures, and identities, Turkish, Kurd, Armenian, Greek, Cherkes, Abkhaz, and so on. I think that Dink's position was far from such an ideal of reinserting into contemporary context previously defined and bounded identities that were presumed to once coexist harmoniously in Anatolia. It rather seems to me that what Dink's unique and dangerous project embodied was reclaiming and redefining an Armenian identity as an intimate condition of redefining what it means to be a citizen of Turkey and vise versa. Agos, the bilingual newspaper that Hrant Dink established is perhaps one such new space, one of the main institutions for such a reconstruction and reclaiming. While Agos will continue its life, it is not so certain that Hrant Dink's place will be filled.

Palestinians and Peace activists dress like Native Americans in Protest (article linked here)

2007-01-16T00:22:00.000-05:00

(sorry for the double posting, but this was so good, i couldn't resist)

...as one ras rolls, another steps up...

2007-01-14T23:43:00.000-05:00

Taking the “commune without a leader” and “body without a head” theme in a new direction… I’m talking about the lynching of Saddam, his head not severed, but his neck marked by a ring of wounds, as is shown in the most recent cell phone recording of his lifeless body.

We are now more than two weeks after his killing. We were so saddened by it, not because of any attachment to the man, of course, but because its symbolism was too great and too empty at the same time, or great in its banality, perhaps. We were not overwhelmed with a feeling of rage as we may have been if this had all happened at the beginning of the invasion. And I don’t think that supporters of the war were even celebrating, as they would have been before. He had already been killed anyway. Even with his refusal to acknowledge the court, we could all see him confined to it, so it seemed kind of goofy and sad. And of course, we can’t even be sad about it, because we hated him too. We couldn’t even be enraged that they killed a hero since we hated him, not to mention that he was already dead. So we end up just feeling weird and cheated and realize that we are almost at the 4th year of the occupation of Iraq.

Maybe it is too easy to make the connection between Saddam’s trial and the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961. The Eichmann trial, remember, was separate from the Nuremburg trials, and was all about, as Hannah Arendt neatly pointed out, firming up the new Israeli national identity. It was the first time that people there and around the world heard stories from the concentration camps told in public--noteworthy since the Israeli state at the time was quite intent on suppressing any holocaust identity in service of the “new Jew” hyper-macho Israeli identity. It was a kind of public reinforcement of the “necessity” of the Jewish state, and a performance to bring the nation and the world along for the emotional talking through of shame and victimhood, that culminated with the hanging of Eichmann, the residue of which could be nothing but a renewed collective pride in the militaristic state. After all, even if you are opposed to the state, how could you disagree with the punishment of the mastermind of crimes against humanity? That is the trick we are feeling now, of course.

Eichmann was different than Saddam in that he fully participated in his show trial, and even appealed on the grounds of Israeli law. That was part of what was so horrifying about it for people. He showed no extra-legal resistance. They wanted him to be such a monster, but he was just this guy with glasses. (Arendt writes: ‘Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.’) But then he also showed no remorse, as he admitted to what acts he was accused of, but not of their symbolic importance. He famously said that he would have done it again, not owning the crimes, but admitting that it was all straight up careerism for him, and in effect still was in that he did not seem to be in an “afterwards” state of reflection. He felt that he was the victim of those who took advantage of his obedience and commitment to a job well done. He was full of clichéd phrases, and maddened the judges by describing his career, which they saw as in and of itself horrid, with joy and elation, as though he was just recounting his newest promotion.

Eichmann’s last words were: “After a while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany. Long live Austria. Long live Argentina. I shall not forget them.” Saddam’s last words were garbled and misreported, though apparently amongst them were retorts to the guards who were taunting him, “Palestine is Arab,” and his final words, the shahada, though he died before he could finish.

Saddam also never let go of his nationalistic phrases. He was different in so many ways, of course, especially that he was a leader while Eichmann was a man behind the scenes. But in their trials they were the same in that they did not go out of character. But in such a situation how could they? What do we expect them to do? Apologize? Wouldn’t that be even more obscene? How can someone be punished enough, how can he apologize enough? How do we understand this excess? I know these are the most basic questions, but I don’t know how to think around them.

All this talk about beheading, too, makes me think about how shocked people in the U.S. and Europe were at seeing the videos of the beheadings of hostages in Iraq. Not unusual, I guess, to fixate on individual beheadings in order not to see the beheading of Iraq.

And finally, as one ras rolls, another steps up. Isn’t there some symbolic connection between the demise of Saddam and the nomination of Khalilzad for Bolton’s old position? Why don’t the newscasters just repeat over and over “he would be the first Muslim in the U.S. cabinet” like a mantra, and take out all of the extra words that they throw in around that sentence just to make it seem casual?

Is surprise possible?

2007-01-10T00:12:00.000-05:00

or, is it ever possible that the letter does not arrive at its destination?

There is a well-known debate between Lacan and Derrida. It is, for instance, a debate that Althusser alludes to in his Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996]--an essential reading in understanding why psychoanalysis is important for Marxism. I am not sure if the debate really materialized in these terms but Lacan does acknowledge, in one of his Seminars (XX), the presence of a Derridean critique of his Ecrits: Jean Luc-Nancy and Philip Lacoue-Labarthe's The Title of the Letter [Albany: SUNY Press, 1992]. This book is a very lucid Derridean critique where the authors claim that Lacan's anti-philosophical gesture, the ex-centring of the Subject (as the Cogito), is actually a reinscription of the philosophical subject--even if the subject of psychoanalysis (unlike the subject of the traditional philosophical discourse) is a lacking subject.

Now, the real question is not so much if the subject is lacking or not. In fact, Lacan's formula has always been "failure to be" ("manque a etre"). In other words, the subject in psychoanalysis is not a subject who lacks, but rather a subject who fails. The two are different. In the first formulation, there is a subject and then there is a lack. In other words, the phrasing posits the existence of a subject and then identifies its status as the one who lacks. Whereas in the second formulation, the very existence of subject is in question: failing subject, failure to be a subject... I think the Lacanian response to the Western philosophical discourse is to introduce a crack, a suspicion, a question mark. Or, to speak graphically, to strike the S of the subject with a bar. In other words, the subject in psychoanalysis is a split subject not a lacking subject. The Derridean critique would be correct only if Lacan was speaking of a subject who lacks, as opposed to a failing subject.

But, then, is there no debate between Lacan and Derrida? There is and it begins with Lacan's rather controversial (not the first time) formulation: "A letter always arrives at its destination." Derrida's response in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond [Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1987], as paraphrased by Althusser, is "It happens that a letter may not arrive at its destination." Given this set up, it may be quite tempting to "interpret" Lacan as the (obscene) Father of necessitarian teleologists and Derrida as the (good) shaman of the radical contingency. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that we should resist this temptation.

We should resist the temptation, because the debate is on the ontological status of surprise (recognition/misrecognition) and about how to understand temporality. To begin with, neither formula is incorrect. Viewed from the perspective of linear temporality and the humanist conception of intentionality, it does happen that the letter (understood in its multiple meanings, as a letter in an envelope, as a letter of the alphabet, as the capital letter of a particular word, etc.) may not arrive at its destination. In fact, it is always a surprise when it arrives at its destination.

Yet, on the other hand, viewed from the psychoanalytical perspective of temporality--and here I am referring to Freud's concept of nachtraglichkeit/apres-coup/after-effect--a letter always arrives at its destination because its destination is always posited after its arrival. To put it differently, from a psychoanalytical perspective, there is no destination of the letter that pre-dates (no puns intended) its arrival. In this formulation, Lacan articulates the circular logic of performativity of the letter: There is no real surprise because everything is a surprise. And in fact, if there is a surprise it is always in relation to the fantasy of a pre-destination. When we subtract the concept of pre-destination as an ontological entry point (as we should subtract the concept of subject as an ontological entry point too) it will become possible to glimpse at the temporal moebius strip that the Lacanian formula points at: If the letter is performative and if the last signifier reconfigures the entire chain that preceeds it, if the destination is also where the letter arrives at, then a letter always arrives at its destination-with the proviso that the meanings of "arrival" and "destination" are understood within the non-linear world of the split subjects.

"I'm going away tonight": James Brown (1933-2006)

2007-01-05T20:36:00.000-05:00

The death of James Brown seems to deserve some sort of gesture. Not intended as an obiturary, what follows is merely the transcription of the lyrics to "James Brown" by the long-forgotten group Ghetto Reality, written in 1969.

Born in Augusta Georgia
James Brown
Born in Augusta Georgia
James Brown
Born in Augusta Georgia
He was a poor shoe shin boy
Now…he is the King of Soul

Ugh
Ugh good God
Ugh
Ugh good God
Ugh
Ugh good God

His hair was slick and shiny
James Brown
He hair was slick and shiny
James Brown

Now he sports his afro
He is thinking…Lord I am proud
He is the King of soul
Hey Hey Hey

Ugh
With your bad self
Ugh
Get funky
Ugh
Can’t stand it
Ugh
Good God

Born in Augusta Georgia
James Brown
Born in Augusta Georgia
James Brown
Born in Augusta Georgia
He was a poor little shoe shine boy
Now...he is the King of soul
Hey Hey Hey

A leader without a body?

2007-01-03T13:47:00.000-05:00

The following is a quote from Ernesto Laclau's The Populist Reason (Verso, 2005: 60-1), but, as he explains, he himself is quoting in extenso from Sigmund Freud. I think it is important to read this passage in relation to "A commune with a leader?" and "No commune without a leader?" postings. [It is even possible to read it in relation to the "A body without a head" posting.] This is the last in a series of postings and I will lay it low on this topic after this installment.

Let us finish this discussion by stressing that Freud was so acutely aware of the impossibility of reducing the process of group formation to the central role of the authoritarian chief of the horde that at the beginning of the Chapter 6 of Group Psychology he provides us with an interventory of other possible situations and social combinations-it is, in fact, a sort of programmatic description of a virgin terrain to be intellectually occupied. It is worthwhile quoting it in extenso:

Now much else remains to be examined and described in the morphology of groups. We should have to give our attention to the different kinds of groups, more or less stable, that arise spontaneously, and to study the conditions of their origin and of their dissolution. We should above all be concerned with the distinction between groups which have a leader and leaderless groups. We should consider whether groups with leaders may not be the more primitive and complete, whether in the others an idea, an abstraction, may not take the place of the leader (a state of things to which religious groups, with their invisible head, form a transitional stage), and whether a common tendency, a wish in which a number of people can have a share, may not in the same way serve as a substitute. This abstraction, again, may be more or less completely embodied in the figure of what we may call a secondary leader and interesting varieties would arise from the relation between the idea and the leader. The leader or the leading idea might also, so to speak, be negative; hatred against a particular person or institution might operate in just the same unifiying way, and might call up the same kind of emotional ties as positive attachment. Then the
question would also arise whether a leader is really indispensable to the essence of a group-and other questions besides. [Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), in The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII, p. 100, London, Vintage, 2001.]

Acephale

2007-01-02T08:51:00.000-05:00

(ir)rational numbers

2006-12-24T20:23:00.000-05:00

kenan's post '1,2,3...40 and tada!' on performativity somehow reminded me of two curious verses in koran, which amaze and amuse me to no end but since it wasn't much related to the topic i didn't want to post them as comment back then. since this is a 'holy' day, i wanted to share them with you, those two verses of pure holiness without much comment:

11- allah enjoins you concerning your children: the male shall have the equal of the portion of two females; then if they are more than two females, they shall have two-thirds of what the deceased has left, and if there is one, she shall have the half; and as for his parents, each of them shall have the sixth of what he has left if he has a child, but if he has no child and (only) his two parents inherit him, then his mother shall have the third; but if he has brothers, then his mother shall have the sixth after (the payment of) a bequest he may have bequeathed or a debt; your parents and your children, you know not which of them is the nearer to you in usefulness; this is an ordinance from allah: surely allah is knowing, wise.
12 - and you shall have half of what your wives leave if they have no child, but if they have a child, then you shall have a fourth of what they leave after (payment of) any bequest they may have bequeathed or a debt; and they shall have the fourth of what you leave if you have no child, but if you have a child then they shall have the eighth of what you leave after (payment of) a bequest you may have bequeathed or a debt; and if a man or a woman leaves property to be inherited by neither parents nor offspring, and he (or she) has a brother or a sister, then each of them two shall have the sixth, but if they are more than that, they shall be sharers in the third after (payment of) any bequest that may have been bequeathed or a debt that does not harm (others); this is an ordinance from allah: and allah is knowing, forbearing.

and for further examples of this sort of intricate calculations/directions see leviticus in the hebrew bible, especially the section where it prohibits eating the fat on the kidney of a certain animal.

merry christmas.

A commune with a leader?

2006-12-24T11:39:00.000-05:00

The following lenghty quote is an epic footnote (No. 112, pp. 373-375) from Jack Amariglio's dissertation Economic History and the Theory of Primitive of Socio-Economic Development (University of Massachusetts, 1984) and it pertains to the theoretical status of the so-called Asiatic Mode of Production (AMoP). For Amariglio, the AMoP is not a distinct mode of production like capitalism, feudalism, etc., but rather a form of the commune. In bringing this footnote 112 to our attention my aim is not to revitalize an old Marxist debate on the theoretical status of AMoP, but rather to address Kenan's comment to my earlier "appropriation" of Fassbinder's remarks on the question of commune and the status of leader in relation the commune. Both Fassbinder and Kenan seems to believe that a commune, perhaps by definition, must be without a leader. Whereas the footnote quoted below articulates a different position. According to Amariglio, it is possible to imagine forms of the commune organized around leaders who are "communally designated" as the appropriators of surplus. [The image, with all due respect to the gap between the text below and the image, is the cover of Leviathan by Abraham Bosse (1602-1676) and the inner quote from Marx is from The Grundrisse.]

The question of whether Asiatic state appropriation is a form of Asiatic communal appropriation (a "primary" appropriation), or whether State "appropriation" is really a "distribution" of communally extracted surplus-labor to the Asiatic State as a subsumed class distributed share [a "tribute"], or whether Asiatic State appropriation is non-communal (perhaps feudal) opens up a wide range of related questions, such as what communal appropriation means, whether or not the Asiatic State may include a fundamental class process, and how communal redistribution takes place. Marx states: "A part of their [the "small" commune's"] surplus-labour belongs to the higher community, which exists ultimately as a person, and this surplus-labour takes the form of tribute, etc., as well as of common labour for the exaltation of the unity, partly of the real despot, partly of the imagined clan-being, the god" (p. 473). On close examination, the questions raised above cannot be resolved by reference to Marx's formulation.

It is possible, for example, for individuals within the Asiatic State to be conceived as occupying one or more subsumed class positions for which they receive in the form of tribute, a distribution of already communally appropriated surplus-labor. But there is a problem in this formulation. For this formulation presupposes a clear distinction, realized in the appropriation of surplus-labor, between the "higher" and "small" community (or commune). However, if the Asiatic commune takes the form of both the "higher" and "small" commune, then the distinction between them is purely formal and/or designed to call attention to their different constitution (overdetermination) as forms of the commune. We cannot call the village communities the "real" commune upon which the "imaginary" (higher) commune exists unless we wish to argue that the "real" commune is not itself ideologically constituted or, rather, that its constitution is natural, organic, and so forth, hence, "objective." What would make the village (here "small") commune less of an ideological representation to the commune members or less culturally bound together than its "higher" manifestation? What could it mean to say that the village community is the "real" appropriator of communal surplus-labor and that the Asiatic State (as higher community) merely receives a distributed share of this real appropriation but does not itself communally appropriate surplus-labor? For us, the village commune is every bit as much an ideological manifestation as is the Asiatic State (since the former is both constituted by and represents itself as a commune through various cultural designations, such as kinship).

As we discuss below, in a crude materialist sense, there is no communal appropriation if what is meant by the commune is not an ideologically constituted social body but, instead, is the group of direct producers, stripped of all cultural designations. The notion of a socially designated group of agents stripped of their cultural determinations is nonsensical. However, this is the confusion that is brought about when appropriation is presented as a purely physical act (what could this mean?) and when the direct propducers are treated as acting individually or as a group of individuals (a most ideological concept) who share only the act of appropriating, hence, as the "real appropriators." For Marx, appropriation is a social process done by socially constituted agents. Therefore, to say that only directly producing agents rather than families, communities, or classes, appropriate surplus-labor is, first, not to comprehend the social constitution of direct producers as appropriators (and as individuals) and, second, to make impossible the conception of appropriation by bodies that comprise non-producing as well as producing agents.

We treat below the Germanic and ancient forms of the commune in terms of communal appropriation despite the "fact" that individual agents (peasants and not the entire families or communities) may be said to "really" "appropriate" surplus-labor. Again this notion of peasant appropriation substitutes the supposedly "objective" observation of the physical act of appropriation by "one-sided" agents for the theorization of the social constitution of the process of appropriation and of the agents who produce and appropriate surplus-labor. That is, if peasants appropriate surplus-labor through membership in the commune (and, therefore, are communally designated as the producers and "immediate appropriators" of surplus-labor), then we treat this appropriation as communal appropriation. Thus, what is often treated as "individual" appropriation, we consider merely a form of communal appropriation, since this appropriation takes place in and through the culturally designated bodies of family, clan, and commune. And, we argue that if we conceive the family, clan, and commune to be comprised of more than the population of abstractly conceived direct producers, then communal appropriation is never reducible to appropriation by these direct producers (but it must include appropriation by communally designated direct producers).

Hence, what is meant by communal appropriation can not be grounded in an appeal to the supposed "real" producers and extractors, as if the relations of these producers to each other, to nature, and to non-producers are not mediated by and through the ideological/cultural processes that comprise the commune. The problem for the Asiatic commune, then, is interpreting the distinction "higher" and "small" community to see whether Asiatic communal appropriation can be attributed to either or both forms of the Asiatic commune. We have chose to treat the Asiatic state as a form of the Asiatic commune, arguing that it participates in the communal appropriation of surplus-labor as subsumed class payments.

No commune without a leader?

2006-12-18T22:50:00.000-05:00

This is transcribed from a documentary included among the supplementary matter for the BDR Trilogy (comprising of The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola) DVD Box Set produced by those good people at the Criterion. The title of the documentary is I don't just want you to love me and it is directed by Hans Gunther Pflaum. The following is Fassbinder speaking to and away from the camera, chain smoking, and feeling deeply disturbed by the experience. The picture to the left is him (in a more animated moment) with, of course, Jeanne Moreau.

[NB. The inner quote is from an inserted footage and again it is Fassbinder who speaks and responds to the question: "A commune?" ]

"Working on a film or in a theater, for example, the atmosphere that’s created, the complications, getting to know each other or not getting to know each other—all that may have a lot to do with how I lived as small child. Sure. I can only say, and I’ve said it before, that I prefer that to being fixated on one or two or three people. I’m very glad that I had this strange, non-parental home life.

[…]

"There was only the desire, widely held among various people at the time for a group, for a new form of cooperation, and cohabitation, and so on. We tried in our way to put into practice what others had tried in their own way. For a long time we pretended to be a group even when it was clear to us we weren’t one. Perhaps, too, we thought—to return to what you said earlier—if we say again and again that we’re a group, perhaps we’ll become one. But that doesn’t work. Simply saying so doesn’t make it reality.

--It was our goal from the start to become a collective—the kind of collective with which we began the Action Theater. We would produce theater, but above all we would live together.
--A commune?
--Yes, a commune. That was our goal, but it became increasingly apparent that it wasn’t attainable.

"I’d say that I grew up in such a way that I don’t need a leader and don’t need to be one either. I have been around many people who were ultimately looking for a father or a mother, and, well-- Initially, I think I went along with that because I thought it was a transitional phase. Eventually, I realized it wasn’t a transitional phase, that maybe it was just the role I was supposed to play. That’s regrettable, but it’s a social phenomenon that we couldn’t escape, just like everybody else. You would have to start out differently. The education of the individual, or the education we all received would need to be different so that we no longer needed a leader. We aren’t there yet. Our upbringing is different, so we can’t have a group without a leader."

To wit, Maliha is a "subject in question," as it were (Eglenelim, Ogrenelim)

2006-12-14T17:36:00.000-05:00

Kenan: Dear Jamar and Maliha, could either of you please explain to me the use(s) of these two bewildering phrases, "as it were" and "to wit"? Dictionaries are of no use when it comes to such phrases.

Jamar: Asking Maliha to help you in this is like asking a polar bear at the north pole about the best sunscreen to use in the middle of a blizzard. But, anyway, "to wit" is a bit easier. It is used, usually, in place of "in other words" or " the point is. . ." or "namely" or "that is to say." So, you might say "Maliha's brain is like an empty freight train, to wit. . ." In this instance, "to wit" would suggest that you will be explaining further, but essentially repeating, the why and how Maliha's brain is the way it is. So, "to wit" usually implies that the speaker will add to or clarify some point by restating it (but perhaps in a slightly different form).

"As it were" is a stickier expression. It is mostly meaningless verbiage, but it's often used to double or redouble a point. Or, put otherwise, it's used at the end of some statement to simply suggest the "existence" or probable ontological veracity of what you've just said. So, it's short for "as if it were so." It's strange since it also indicates a bit of doubt since when you say "as it were," it implies there's some fragility in what it is you've initially said so you need to restate or "double" it. Sometimes it also indicates a bit of self-reflection or self-consciousness. It's probably closest to the phrase "so to speak."So, one would say, "when you have to listen to Maliha, you realize your mind is lost in a wind tunnel located somewhere in the midst of a typhoon, as it were." The "as it were" phrase is really a throw-away, but it "works" here to suggest that perhaps you've been metaphorizing and you are calling attention to that fact. It both strengthens and weakens the attempt at a metaphor. It strengthens it by indicating a self-consciousness of having used an analogical reference. It weakens by showing that you need to do such indicating (which means that the analogy didn't really stand on its own). Sometimes, "as it were" implies a bit of irony. Perhaps you can see the irony in the sentence about Maliha's mind.I'll see if i can find other ways to explain all of this. It may involve having to dispense with Maliha as the subject in question. To wit, Maliha IS a "subject in question," as it were.

Kenan: Dear Jack, many thanks. I couldn't ask for a better explanation. I've always wanted to catalogue such phrases that are barely communicable across lingual boundaries. Maybe this will be a start. Would you mind me having your message posted on the surplusthought? I am sure native and foreign speakers alike would enjoy and learn from it. I can substitute "Bush" for "Maliha" to save her the humiliation --what a way to save one's dignity!

Maliha: Please Kenan- use his posting with my name in it- I don't mind one bit, and the whole exchange was so hilarious I cried...and- to tell the truth- I really had no idea about "to wit"- so maybe Jack's analogy wasn't so far off...

Kenan: Thanks, guys. Much appreciated. Now that we've cleared these two out of the way, we can turn to other oddities of English like "why" (in the non-question form).

socio-spatial sublimation

2006-12-13T18:20:00.000-05:00

dear lichette lovers,
i am writing a paper on what i call "socio-spatial sublimation"
in the context of labor practices and management in a jamaican
hotel. in a little nutshell, service workers are elevated to the place
of the Thing by management discourses and work to incite the desire
of tourists.

my question:
can anyone direct me to some literature that directly addresses
the relationship between labor and sublimation?

in addition, can we create a message board at surplus thought?

my thanks for bigbadbull for the invite. it is an honor
and pleasure to be part of the collective.

hear the azaan through Bose speakers!

2006-12-10T17:31:00.000-05:00

I begin at the prompting of y...

Hajj is approaching, and perhaps to connect with various family members about to embark on this rite, I watched ‘Le Grand Voyage’ recently. Quite afraid that it might be a horrid repeat of ‘monsieur ibrahim’ which was an all too trite meditation on Islam (mysticism allows us true communion with other humans, with Islam, and with kind-hearted sex workers), I was met by something else.

Firstly, the movie is amazing for the very last thing it does- revealing actual film footage of Hajj in Mecca. This is new, and as many of us know, there has been a continuous tension around images of Mecca. The first images were leaked in 1853 when a non-Muslim British explorer went to Mecca and described his voyage in a diary. And even though photographs have been circulated of kaaba and hajj for quite some time despite the wahhabi prohibition against iconoclasm, the film scenes are imbued with a bit of the taboo.

Secondly, this film takes us by car from the south of France, through Italy, Serbia, Turkey, Syria, Jordan to Saudi Arabia, an epic 3,000 miles. Visually, this is quite impressive. The father, Mohammed Majd, enrolls his unwilling 18 year old son Reda to be his driver on this voyage. While within the borders of Europe, it is the son who controls communication with border agents and transportation issues. And after they are swindled in Turkey (aren’t we all though…), the poles of the relation shift. The father is capable of speaking multiple Arabic dialects, and after they hit Jordan, he must explain to fellow hajj travelers that his son was raised in France and only understands Moroccan Arabic. They look on with a puzzled expression at the boy as though he was mentally inferior, and Reda must stand by as they are obviously talking about him.

Such a transformation and relation can be viewed in multiple ways: most English reviews I have seen have fixated upon the ‘traditionality’ of the father, and the clash with his ‘modern’ son who is about to take college entrance exams right as this voyage sets out. For many reviews, Hajj, I assume because of its connection to Islam, is firmly within the domain of tradition, and so any person who wishes to go on this pilgrimage must by extension also be traditional. What this reading denies is the ‘cosmopolitan’ nature of Hajj, both historically and in the contemporary period. Certainly historically speaking, Hajj catapulted Cairo and Damascus into world cities precisely through being the two conventional starting points for Hajj (if you wanted to go on Hajj, you had to go to one of these two starting points for the annual caravan). A Hajjee was seen as cosmopolitan, a savvy negotiator of difficult and multiple travel arrangements through many countries. And in this film, the father recuperates such an image of a Hajjee. Beginning in Turkey, it is the father that seems worldly, as he handles shady money-changers and wily Turks.

I am reminded of Bobby Sayyid’s work on tradition and Khomeini’s discourse: to call Khomeini traditional was wrong he argued, because of all the ways that his discourse deployed modernism, using concepts like ‘the people’ and the ‘state.’ Khomeini’s political theory ‘is not a reiteration of traditional shia thought; rather it is a radical and novel reinterpretation of shia political doctrine…’ This is why sunni wahhabis can reject Khomeini as heretic. Returning to the film, we can use Sayyid to see all the ways that Hajj is changed into a ‘modern’ event even if it looks to be an ‘unchanging’ rite. The design, technology, and logistics going into the planning of housing, sanitation, transportation, and regulation of pilgrims are feats of modernism. In 1982, the government created an industrial meat-processing complex to handle the sacrifice and world-wide distribution of animals by all Hajj participants. Different security forces are charged with moving people through sites (the government website states that with one 9000 security agent force, they can get 1.5 million people through the small site where pebbles are cast at three pillars representing the devil in five hours). The desert sand floor surrounding the kaaba has been excavated and equipped with below-ground air-conditioning for a half mile radius so that pilgrims’ bare feet would not be scorched in summer months. The visas and lottery system by which permission to enter and perform the rite are also regulated by the government through an extensive bureaucracy in Saudi Arabia and sending countries. Zam-zam water is now treated with UV rays and made sterile, escalators in the Medina mosque (expanded to fit one million people at once) have been constructed to carry 15,000 people per hour. Radio networks and sound systems abound to carry the azaan.

Various modernist projects (urban planning, sanitation techniques, transportation systems, industrial housing, airport/bridge/road/tunnel construction, food service, police and security forces, etc.) have transformed the face of hajj. What is fascinating is how much hajj has changed, literally from the ground up, and yet it is depicted and even experienced by the pilgrims themselves as something that has remained totally 'unchanged.' Especially in the twentieth century, the aforementioned projects came into existence because of the greatly increased number of people performing Hajj at once (in 1885, Hajj involved a total of 70,000 pilgrims; last year, the number was at 1.7 million). Continuous technological improvement of Hajj is important at a number of levels: ideologically, the successful regulation and management of Hajj demonstrates the good faith of the Saudi monarchy as privileged protectors of this Islamic rite (lest i depict them in some kind of positive light, I do think the Saudi government uses hajj for every last drop of good public relations). It also is important to increase the limit of people able to perform Hajj simultaneously, to demonstrate that there is no limit, and that as Islam’s adherents grow, there is no need to change this mandatory pillar of Islam. Even if only ten percent of Muslims will ever perform Hajj, it is symbolically important and revising the pillar would meet with opposition.

If I was going to come up with a credit-card-commercialesque motto for the Saudi government, I might suggest: “Hajj: we change, so that you don’t have to.” But this would be an advertising lie, because the pilgrims are of course- changed as well. And more importantly, the government would never want to reveal how much hajj and its context have in fact changed.

INLAND EMPIRE by David Lynch (Updated on July 26, 2007)

2006-12-10T11:34:00.000-05:00

Once again we are (and I am assuming the existence of a collective identity, yes) gearing up to that unique experience of watching a new David Lynch movie. My sense is that, from what I am reading in the blogsphere, this is not going to be (not surprisingly) a smooth ride. It is shot on Digital Camera and the subtitle is "A Woman in Trouble". The song on the trailer is written and performed by David Lynch and its called "Ghost of Love". No, unfortunately, it's not available.

On June 26, 2007, I am adding two more clips. The first one is the UK trailer for the movie:

And the second one is a glorious Italian trailer for this movie:

1, 2, 3...40 and tada!

2006-12-06T17:59:00.000-05:00

Is it possible to appropriate “folk wisdom” for high theory? Let’s take a look at an example of folk wisdom as encapsulated in a Turkish proverb: “If you say something 40 times over, it will come about the 41st time” or its more commonly used shortened version “If you say something 40 times over, it will come about”. I could never quite put my finger on it but this saying has always intrigued me. Obviously, there are figures involved, which is always interesting. But the real intrigue of it is that even though at first hearing it sounds very superstitious/religious, at a closer look you can tell it is not necessarily so. It is not praying that you do 40 times over (that would be too truistic even for a proverb); you “say”, “speak”, “utter” something. OK, this might be a more secular interpretation but it doesn’t make much sense, either…Saying something over and over again to bring it about…Sheer discursive repetition inducing a material effect…Hmmm….I think we have a name for that in our circles: performativity.

Seen in this light, the saying in question begins to sound more like Pascal’s motto “even if you don't believe, kneel down and pray, act as if you believe, and the belief will come by itself”, another religious sounding saying which need not be so. The reason why both examples are typically treated as metaphysical injunctions has, in my opinion, less to do with their religious overtones (or contexts as in the latter case) than the denial, obliteration of the materiality of language/discourse. That is, absent an understanding of language/discourse as a sui generis formative force in our universe, it is possible to make sense of these kinds of maxims only in a non-materialist, metaphysical way. With the recognition of the materiality of language, however, comes also the possibility of appropriating such wisdom for materialism. In hindsight, maybe the opening question needs to be rephrased to better capture the purpose of this thought exercise. Is it possible to appropriate ostensibly metaphysical folk wisdom for materialist theory (high or not)? Apparently, it is : )

This is just one example. I’m sure there are many others out there. For example, “evil eye”. Again, on the surface, this is yet another arcane belief in the ability of supernatural powers to bring about something, misfortune in this particular case. Equipped, however, with the conceptual tools of psychoanalysis (e.g. gaze, big Other, etc), it is possible, I believe, to cast evil eye (yes, pun intended) in a materialist light. Anybody want to venture a try?

ymM's burkas, stoler's european paupers, arendt's barbarity

2006-12-03T00:28:00.000-05:00

reading an article by ann stoler a few days ago, i bumped into a short list of prerequisites that dutch colonial government in sumatra set in 1884; to acquire european legal equivalence, one had to be 1-christian, 2-speak and write dutch, 3- have european upbringing and education, and 4-demonstrate a suitability for european society. not that unfamiliar i suppose. stoler says, early in the article, that one shouldn't take the politically constructed dichotomy of colonizer and colonized as given but as an historically shifting pair of social categories that needs to be explained. colonialism is made up of ever-changing rules and regulations, colonial control and profits always secured by constantly readjusting parameters of the colonial elite to delimit those who had access to property and privilege and those who did not.. hannah arendt, too, looks into the global imperialism when she's searching for a 'precedent in western history that might have eased the way for civilized peoples to embrace barbarity', as she puts it. then, one should look at today's barbarity as the continuation of a long process, arguably started with the spaniards' doings in the 'indies' in the 16th century. spanish/dutch/british etc idea of the emerging modern world described the roles each group had in its making, thus, being in the vanguard of setting the racial boundaries and race-thinking, emerged as a party to the state making process, imbuing, along the way, race with very modern and state related confusions: nations and religions, cultures and genes, colors and abilities etc. censuses, maps, museums.. colonialism, according to hannah arendt, required a 'superior caste of bureaucratic rulers who could find a peer wherever the union jack flew'. 'english' had to be a global phenomenon. however, most interestingly, not all the 'englishmen' were equal; they did not share the same possibilities in life. then race thinking also had to obscure these internal divisions; at the same time, though, it had to leave them in place. poor whites (for they too exist) set apart from the rest of the world by trivial biological and other numerous and ever changing set of criteria. how big is that burka to cover up all the sinister obligations of the world?

WHO's WHO

2006-11-30T07:42:00.000-05:00

i don't want to ruin the mystique of S=thought but i sorta wonder who is who here? i get who Kenan Ercel, Phil or maliha are, but some obscure code names are
beyond reach of my imagination.

well, to start with, this is burak talking.

you are...
ymM ... yahya (i'm not sure what the recently added 'saint' means... i have wild guesses though, kinda kinky.)
gd... ???
viola swamp... ryvka?
C-blok... ceren?
bigbadbull... steven?
tesserakontapechys... ???
mr reality-check... ???
jamar... ???
tutulya... tulya?
confisius... ???
frauelein montag... esra?
boris devastated... ???
ch.. ???

Activists in Istanbul Protest Israel's Apartheid Wall

2006-11-28T16:23:00.000-05:00

Are you as put off by this poster as I am?

2006-11-26T11:59:00.000-05:00

It is all over the subways here in New York. I don't even know where to begin. I thought at first that this was some kind of an attempt to show how all of humankind originated in Africa. But the real posters in the subways are less ambiguous than this picture; they actually have "Save Darfur" written across the top.

Okay. Save Darfur. But we are all African? Really? That's why so many Americans don't even understand that Africa is in fact divided into countries, and certainly most would not be able to find Sudan on a map. Furthermore, under what circumstances are we all African? I think it's quite clear that the target audience, which I think is business people "with a heart," artists "with a conscience," etc. not to mention preppy NYU students hopping around the subway with ipods--we are not the Africans that the poster wants us to identify with (as?), and not because (as the picture implies) some of us have different skin tones than "Africans." What is this campaign supposed to message? That Africans are humans too? Yes, I understand that the white American public has trouble relating to people of colour. But I'm not sure that just owning that African identity is gonna make the difference, if that is the action in and of itself. Next time somebody asks me to do something for global justice, I'll just say "oh, I already did my share, I actually am African."

Don't get me wrong. I don't think that this is always a bad tactic. Two years ago some Israelis joined Palestinians and internationals in the town of Budrus to protest the administrative detention of an activist school teacher, all of them holding signs saying "I am Ahmed Awad" (his name). When they were arrested this was the name they all gave. This is different, I think because it was in the context of a solidarity action that they used identification as a tactic, and one which was specifically designed to call attention to his case in order to free him. The goal was clear, the solidarity was strategic, and because of that, the message was really strong.

But for the identification to be an action in and of itself? This is a very liberal and non-committed “put yourself in her shoes” kind of position, a call for sympathy more than any kind of real exploration of what it means to be in solidarity or to really think of oneself as connected with another.

Altman and inner monologue:

2006-11-23T17:42:00.000-05:00

well, (1) because this site started off with an enchanting interest in obituary, and (2) after reading ymM's kind invitation to comment on the link he drew between Badiou's remark on europeans fear of islam and Haneke's Cache (i will... another promise to fulfil), i felt this irresistable urge to play along... Robert Altman died a few days ago, he was 81.

i'm not gonna write about him though. i'm not very familiar with his work, for some obscure reason. i say so because i only saw three of his films, 'Mrs. Miller and McCabe', 'The Long Goodbye' and 'Gosford Park', and all of them were perfect. pure meditations... on a few Leonard Cohen songs, on the use of inner monologue in hard-boiled fiction/film as to generate a distant/objective gaze, and on the irreducible materiality of class stratification (see Woody Allen's 'Match Point' for a more current take on this), respectively.

let me concentrate on the film noir 'cause currently i'm reading Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, actually started couple of hours ago, a 100-page novel written in mid 50s, one of the landmarks of the so-called 'nouveau roman'. from a distance, it has nothing to do with film noir actually. it's about a man who gets jealous. but:

The lustrous black hair falls in motionless curls along the line of her back which the narrow metal fastening of her dress indicates a little lower down.
...

No, her features have not moved. Their immobilty is not so recent: the lips have remained set since her last words.
...
Her silhouette, outlined in horizontal strips against the blind of her bedroom window, has now disappeared... She says "Hello" in the playful tone of someone who has slept well and awakened in a good mood: or of someone who prefers not to show what she is thinking about-if anything-and always flashes the same smile, on principle; the same smile, which can be interpreted as derision just as well as affection, or total absence of any feeling whatever.

this is the cold voice of the male noir protagonist. watching, silent... trapped in his faith...

there is more to it. the story is narrated grammatically in the third person, yet it is actually the inner monologue of a paranoid man who suspects of an affair between his wife (the whore, the femme fatale) and his neighbour (the hairy stupid buddy). there are apparently three characters in the story (man, wife and her lover), they are having drinks on the porch or eating dinner together, and the reader is told of a third glass, plate or chair etc. but never a third person is mentioned. the only way it could have been mentioned is by referring to this person as "I" but the author delibaretely resists to this temptation. that person is always missing. so the novel turns into a series of schizoidly precise/detailed descriptions of objects (windows, stairs, banana trees), of people or of words. extreme subjectivity dissolves into pure objectivity.

of course, it's perfect for cinema. the camera will be the lacking protagonist. but one of the biggest problems is how to maintain the integrity of the story, for the novel has the liberty of not mentioning the "I", whereas in cinema, the "I", the camera, is inescapably there. the more you avoid it, the more visible he becomes.

... and the banana trees on the opposite slope, soon invisible in the darkness.

by the way, Ceylan's latest, "Climates", is a total disaster.

Adventures in Lacano-Marxism

2006-11-22T17:59:00.000-05:00

Paul Allen Miller is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Southern Carolina. C-Blok, j.b., and I met him four years ago when he and his colleagues organized a conference on Psychoanalysis and Social Theory that the three of us went together. The conference is memorable for me for a number of reasons: (1) It was fun to drive to Columbia, SC, listening to music on the car stereo (Admittedly, there was a hegemonic struggle involving both consent and coercion over who will play the next CD!) (2) It was the first conference where C-Blok and I presented our work. (3) Zizek was there; he listened to and commented on our talk--albeit obliquely. (4) Afterwards, when he saw us (on his way to an ATM) in the porch of a nearby pub, drinking beer and having food, he stopped by us, quickly glanced at our food, and offered a concise class analysis of the situation: C-Blok, who was having fish and chips, was an intellectual trying to pass as a member of the working classes, j.b., who was having a steak, was an intellectual who aspires to the lifestyle of haute bourgeoisie, and me, who was having a hamburger, was simply a bland middle class intellectual. (5) And finally, and perhaps most traumatically, on our way back from the conference, we got caught in the middle of the worst storm of the century and it took us an unbelievably hellish 48 hrs to get back to Northampton, MA!

In any case, let me return back to Paul Allen Miller, the organizer of this memorable conference. In 2004, he wrote a book review for the The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (edited by Jean-Michel Rabate). He concludes this review with the paragraph that I quote below. I thought some of our comrades would be invigorated by these words, so I am reproducing them here:

Lastly, while Marxism's status as the untranscendable horizon of our intellectual authenticity may be a thesis that few would defend today, the fact is that many Anglo-American critics first came to Lacan through the Marxism of Jameson and Althusser. Moreover, as Zizek's own practice testifies, the concept of psychoanalysis as a politically progressive practice remains dependent on a certain reading of Marx. In this light, Joe Valente's essay, "Lacan's Marxism, Marxism's Lacan (from zizek to Althusser)," does an admirable job of detailing the various tensions, and at times downright contradictions, between these two bodies of thought. In the end, the essay itself did little to dissuade this reader from the conviction that a Marxism without psychoanalysis is of little use in the postmodern world and that a psychoanalysis without Marx has no political program worthy of the name, but it did offer a solid cautionary tale to all who would see these discourses as easily compatible or reducible one to the other. [From symploke vol. 12, no. 1-2 (Wntr-Spring 2004): 279-81.]

"Netherlands proposes to ban burkas"

2006-11-17T22:26:00.000-05:00

There are a couple of aspects of the matter that incites my interests in these--let me put out it out there right away--racist laws. And, to be entirely honest, none of them really relate to the question of secularism. I identify as a secular subject, but these so-called defences of secularism leave me cold--to say the least.

First of all, what I am really interested in is to develop a distinctively leftist response to the debate. Alain Badiou, in a very sarcastic and powerful critique of the "scarfed law" in France, begins to formulate a leftist position that I can identify with, more or less. The ridiculousness of these bans compels Badiou to build his analysis of the french ban on hijab from the basic lacanian thesis pertaining the status of fantasy: rather than revealing anything about the object of fantasy, they lay bare the unconscious investments of the subject(s) of the fantasy. The title of the essay "Behind the Scarfed Law, There is Fear" is explained in a paragraph towards the end of this short intervention:

27. In truth of fact, the Scarfed Law expresses one thing and thing alone: fear. Westerners in general, the French in particular, are but a shivering, fearful lot. What are they afraid of? Barbarians, as usual. Those from within, i.e. the "young suburbanites"; those from without, i.e. "Islamist terrorists." Why are they frightened? Because they are guilty, but claim to be innocent. They are guilty of having renounced and attempted to annihilate-ever since the 1980s-every kind of emancipatory politics, every revolutionary form of Reason, and every true assertion of something else. Guilty of clutching at their lousy privileges. Guilty of being but old children playing with their manifold purchases. Yes, indeed, "in a long childhood, they have been made to age." They are thus afraid of everything a little less aged. A stubborn young lady, for instance.

This analysis reminded me of Michael Haneke's Cache. Perhaps, our contributor j.b. would like to intervene to my connection.

Of course, this critique of the "scarfed law" implicates the leftists, feminists, seculars, and other so-called progressive (liberal) forces that lend support to it. The question of the feminist critique of the "veil" and the question of how to understand it in the context of the political economy of capitalism opens a second layer of considerations that leads us, unfortunately, to the question of how to theorize capitalism.

Here, in the same article, Badiou, once more mobilizes a set of lacanian concepts, this time the psychoanalytical critique of the libidinal economy of capitalism:

16. It is said virtually everywhere that the "veil" is an intolerable symbol of control over female sexuality. Do you really believe female sexuality to not be controlled in our society these days? This naiveté would have made Foucault laugh. Never has so much care been given to female sexuality, so much attention to detail, so much informed advice, so much distinguishing between its good and bad uses. Enjoyment has become a sinister obligation. The universal exposure of supposedly exciting parts is a duty more rigid than Kant's moral imperative. In passing, between our tabloids' "Enjoy it, women!" and our great-grandmothers' dictate "Don't enjoy it!" Lacan long ago established an isomorphism. Commercial control is more constant, more certain, more massive than patriarchal control could ever be. Generalized prostitutional circulation is faster and more reliable than the hardships of family incarcerations, the turnabouts of which kept audiences laughing for centuries from Ancient Greek comedy to Molière.

While I wholeheartedly agree that the shift from "don't enjoy it" to "enjoy it" is an important shift in the very ideological coordinates of capitalism, I would like to highlight two problems with this analysis.

Perhaps, from a marxist-lacanian perspective, the distinction that Badiou articulates between "commerical control" and "patriarchal control" is somewhat problematic. It is problematic because I am not so sure I understand how the two differ from one another. Elsewhere, C-Blok and I argued that the logic of capitalist-all resembles the masculine logic of exception that Lacan develops out of his readings of Freud and Kant (see Joan Copjec's "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason" for a "heady" introduction). If those two are homologous, then, what are the differences between commercial and patriarchal control? Do they correspond to capitalist and feudal forms of exploitation, respectively? If they do, then is the story that Badiou tells us the story of an uneven transition (or, perhaps, perpetual co-existence of) two modes of production (with their particular economic, political, and cultural conditions of existence) side by side, or is he sarcastically pointing at the anachronistic obsession, in the age of late capitalism, with feudalism, patriarchy, etc.?

This brings me to the second problem. The analysis of capitalism that informs this critique of the "scarfed law" views capitalism as a "commercial" system. In this analysis, capitalism is conflated with markets. Capitalism should not be equated with markets but rather should be viewed as an insititutional organization of the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus by non-laborers that can exist with a variety of forms of circulation (ranging from the price mechanism to the administrative fiat). One important limitation of this view of capitalism qua market, a view that fails to conceptualize capitalism as one among many institutional forms (e.g., feudal, slave) of trying to domesticate the real of class antagonism, is its failure to formulate and enact a different relation to the real of class antagonism. Reduction of capitalism to market exhange simplifies it and to the extent that the object of critique is simplified, it becomes difficult to find openings in its edifice to begin deconstructing it.

The problem surfaces most clearly in Badiou's deployment of "prostitution" as the metonymy of the "commercial" system.

17. The mother and the whore. In some countries, reactionary laws are drafted in favor of the mother and against the whore. In other countries, progressive laws are drafted in favor of the whore and against the mother. Yet it's the alternative between the two which must be rejected.

18. Not however by the "neither... nor...", which only perpetuates on neutral ground (i.e. at the center, like with François Bayrou?) what it professes to contest. "Neither mother, nor whore," that's quite pathetic. As is "neither whore nor submissive," which is simply absurd: isn't a "whore" generally submissive, and oh so much? In France in the past, they used to be called "les respectueuses" (the respected). Public submissives, all in all. As for "subs" themselves, perhaps they are only private whores.

Without doubt, we should reject the alternative between the mother and the whore, or the patriarcial and the commercial, or the feudal and the capitalist. Yet, as Marjolein van der Veen (scroll down at the linked page for the relevant paragraph) has elegantly articulated years ago, our representation of "the whore" as a metonymy of capitalism reveals more about our own fantasies than the practice of prostitution itself. It is perhaps wrong to take Badiou's treatment of the concept of "the whore" too literally. Yet at the same time, by reducing "prostitution" into "the selling of the body" (rather than "the performance and the sale of a service"), he defines "the whores" as "public submissives". In his attempt to deconstruct the representation of the "hijab girl" as the submissive one, he ends up constructing a discourse on the whore as the submissive one. In other words, he argues, forget about the patriarchal oppression, the real oppression is the commercial oppression!

In this sense, in order to show us that the ridiculousness of the "hijab issue," Badiou juxtaposes the "scarfed law" and the patriarchal oppression that the law claims to oppose with the capitalist colonization and oppression of our lives. Which is, of course, fine and welcome. But, in doing so, he constructs a particular discourse of capitalism-a discourse of capitalism that does not permit us to think beyond the logic of exception.

These concerns, along with the ongoing imperialist war in the Middle East and the sustained construction of the Muslim as the new Jew in Western liberal capitalist democracies, should perhaps constitute some of the points of departure for left (and truly secular) engagements with these laws.

Another obituary (of sorts)

2006-11-16T17:56:00.000-05:00

I read in the news today that Milton Friedman, 94, is dead.
I say, good riddance.
That is pretty much all he had to say
for those left behind by the social Darwinist policies
he championed all his life: good riddance.

With all due respect to the interval, or, courting a science of the image

2006-11-15T19:19:00.000-05:00

In defiance of all pretentions of purpose and/or usefulness...the first G.Frege post:

Lately I have daydreamed over how to conceive of the specific economy that is embedded in the act of quotation. Could we perhaps call it the sister of appropriation (as Lacan calls truth the sister of jouissance)?

Flaubert, September 1852: "Beauty may become a useless sentiment and art something between algebra and music."

I hope our blog, over time, moves in the direction of the latter. Nevertheless...I felt encouraged to post images:

Agamben, July 1975: "For [Aby] Warburg, the attitude of artists toward images inherited from tradition was conceivable in terms neither of aesthetic choice nor of neutral reception; for him it is a matter of confrontation--which is lethal or vitalizing, depending on the situation--with the tremendous energies stored in images, which in themselves had the potential either to make man regress into sterile subjection or to direct him on his path toward salvation and knowledge."

Hollis Frampton, September 1971: "A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema."

Deleuze, March 1970: "There is no apprentice who is not the Egyptologist of something."

community in dispersion

2006-11-14T23:11:00.001-05:00

Its very odd to think that just a few short years ago we, well most of us, called the Pioneer Valley home. Even stranger to think that most of us are not there now. I have a lot to write in this forum. My student/colleague Jason and I are almost through with Transcritique and I think that has been a very productive read for the both of us. I feel like the philosophical substance of this book--that philosophers (and others) are always writing from this in-between, transcritical position (for example, the evolution of Marx's writing in relation to his being in-between France, Germany and England)--speaks in some way to our collective condition as well. As much as I can see the value of seeing myself in relation to universality/singularity, I am still working through and mourning the loss of my general/individual self.

In this initial post, I simply wanted to thank YMM for setting up the forum.
Stephen (aka. big-bad-bull)

Words Without Borders

2006-11-10T12:16:00.000-05:00

This month's "Words Without Borders" magazine for international literature is on Palestine, and includes some of our *favourites* like Azmi Bishara and Mahmoud Darwish. Most of the pieces are short enough to print out and read on the train/plane/boat/bus.

Alfred Kinsey & Gibson-Graham

2006-11-08T17:01:00.000-05:00

Let me begin my first contribution to surplus thought by thanking ymm (aka ‘rummenigge’ aka ‘dj plummer’ aka ‘obscene daddy’) for not only launching this platform but also for getting the ball rolling with his obituary on Ecevit (a Turkish Allende who, unlike his Chilean counterpart, survived a military coup –albeit only physically, not ideologically, as ymm duly laments). I think thanks are also in order for Erkan (aka ‘dj eko’ aka ‘that subliminal kid’) for pitching us the idea of a collective blog (though he is yet to become a member himself!). As we are dispersing wider and wider geographically, a virtual meeting place is all the more needed to sustain our community.

…

Kinsey & Gibson-Graham…To be honest with you, my familiarity with Alfred Kinsey doesn’t go much further than the motion picture of the same name (2004), starring Liam Neeson as the iconoclastic professor. For those philistines among us who may not know about Kinsey even that much, Kinsey is renowned for his groundbreaking studies on human sexuality, which have shattered pretty much all the convictions about ab/normal sexual behavior widely held at the time (late 40s, early 50s) and for that matter, to a large extent, still today. Drawing on the results of thousands of in-depth interviews conducted with people of varying ages, occupations, etc. (not so much of color, though) Kinsey demonstrates that heterosexual, monogamous, reproductive sex is hardly the norm it is believed to be; people engage in all different sorts of sexual practices that don’t fit this norm (masturbation, bisexuality, premarital sex, S&M, paid sex were found to be much more common than was believed to be the case; “erogenous zone” turned out to be applicable to pretty much any part of the body or to put in the scientifically cautious terms of the Kinsey report itself “there is no part of the human body which is not sufficiently sensitive to effect erotic arousal for at least some individuals in the population”; bestiality proved to be very common among men in the countryside, etc.).

It must be obvious by now to this audience where I am going with this: Kinsey is to sexual studies what Gibson-Graham is to economics. In both cases the goal is to undo the hegemonic discourse which conditions us to live in denial of those (sexual & economic) practices that constitute a big chunk of our social existence.

O.K., this analogy—in certain respects, homology—between heteronormativity and capitalocentrism is not news to anyone who knows their Gibson-Graham well. We know Gibson-Graham draw on deconstruction of sexuality (ala Butler) for their explorations of economic difference. That being said, I don’t think this renders redundant the parallels drawn above between Kinsey and Gibson-Graham because what interests me in Kinsey’s studies is not so much the sexuality per se but the etnographic dynamics at play in the research/interview process. I wasn’t a member of the Community Economies Collective (CEC) but from the various accounts of that project I have heard and read over the years, I can say with some confidence that it has very interesting methodological affinities with the Kinsey studies. There is no denying that Kinsey’s was a positivist undertaking whose ultimate goal was to unearth the truth about human sexuality whereas Gibson-Graham define their project as a performative act (which, in Buck-Morss’ eloquent formulation, is “trying to bring about that which one presumes”). But I don’t think Kinsey has to be taken at his own word because performativity is there no matter how Kinsey & Co make sense of their own project. And this is where the movie comes into the picture (no pun intended) because it sheds light on those performative moments of the research that one wouldn’t be able to know about from merely reading the Kinsey reports.

As the movie makes abundantly clear, there is no way Kinsey and his assistants could have come up with the surprising results they did, had they engaged in simple data-gathering (of the census-taking style). For although what was believed to be the norm turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg (of actual human sexual practices), almost all the participants of the research thought otherwise, at least initially. This is why Kinsey and his research team had to come up with creative methods to tease out answers from their “reluctant subjects,” who exhibited strong resistance to acknowledging those parts of their sexual experience that didn’t square with “the norm”. In other words, they were also striving to “bring about that which they presumed”.

…

This is taking much longer than I thought and I’m afraid it is time for me to go back to the production of “necessary thought” (prospectus, reviews, etc.), but I will try to pick up from where I left off at my earliest convenience. In the meantime, though, I’d be very much interested to hear what you folks have got to say about the topic.

a tale of two "ecevit"s (in lieu of an obituary)

2006-11-07T07:34:00.000-05:00

ecevit was an interesting figure. i used to prefer him to demirel. when i was a little boy, sitting on the floor in the living room and watching the news on the black and white tv with my parents, every night ecevit and demirel would come out and put on something not so different than a laurel and hardy show-at least in my (probably) six years old eyes and imagination.

perhaps because he was distinctly more attractive (thin, young, energetic with dark black hair combed back with a very symbolic moustache-[see right]) than the corporate-looking and well-fed demirel (though weight was not an issue with laurel), i used to prefer ecevit. or perhaps i was already a social democrat populist.

ecevit was a social democrat or, what one would call, a left populist leader. he was, in many senses of the analogy, the lula of turkey. not only he came to power through a leftist platform both in the seventies (and then in the post-coup nineties), but also, like lula in brazil, he capitulated (in his post-coup career) to all the demands of the imf and the world bank.

let me be clear. i am not using the adjective "left populist," like many do, in a pejorative manner. in the seventies, ecevit did bring together a large electoral coalition of progressive forces in turkey. such a leftist and winning electoral coalition has never been produced until then and has not yet been produced since then. in this period, his economic policies were constituted by a combination of social programs and an advanced level of "import-substitution-industrialization" (i.e., the protection of the local industries with the intention of gradually creating backward linkages). of course, an important class-base of this project was the then well-organized urban proletariat. in this period, he also initated a project of social economy, titled people's sector, to construct, cultivate, and support a sector of the economy composed of publicly and cooperatively owned industries, agricultural cooperatives, and small businesses.

but this was all before the coup d'etat of 1980. coup banned both ecevit and demirel from politics and tortured, imprisoned, and (gasp) hanged an entire generation of leftist activists that helped to create the wave that carried ecevit to power in the seventies. after 1980, the military regime/dictatorship swiftly re-structured the economy as well as the polity paving the way for thatcherite turgut ozal (an economist who worked at the imf for awhile in the late 1970s) to privatize, liberalize (finance and trade), and reorient the development strategy from the government-led and labor-capital-accord-centered "import-substitution-industrialization" to the (also) government-led but explicitly pro-business and anti-labor "export-oriented-industrialization."

if ecevit was the hero of the dispossessed in the seventies, his post-coup period is pretty difficult to stomach. he became a bitter divider of the social democratic left and constituted a party of two (with his wife rahsan ecevit) in his democratic left party (which was neither democratic nor left). when he came to power, he did so because he embraced anti-kurdish, nationalist positions and surrendered the economic initative to the control of the imf and the world bank. in fact, in this period, his economics minister was kemal dervis-who also came to turkey after an illustrous carreer at the world bank.

one final anecdotish: before he got into politics full time, ecevit was a poet (perhaps not unlike the poet-politician in kustirica's underground) and an art critic. in the sixties, he established aica-turkey (association internationale des critiques d'art). later on, a couple of years ago, when aica was re-established, the new team acknowledged his initial efforts and honored him in the re-inauguration of the branch of the association in turkey. by then, he was already an ex-prime minister, but beral madra (one of those who re-established the association) notes that he was very affected by being honored on this particular account. perhaps, this was due to the unexpected recognition of an aspect of his life that was long ago a truncated by the ordinary business of politics that he chose to fully engage in.

some matters of logistics

2006-11-06T12:51:00.000-05:00

this entry will be continually edited and will address matters of using the blogspot.

1. please familiarize yourself with the technology of blogging.
2. if you would like to update links and cannot figure out how to, let me know.
3. we should think of links we want to be associated with. we should also link ourselves to other blogs and ask them to link us.
4. please use images.
5. don't feel oppressed by the idea of blogging. just blog away. i will edit, if necessary.
6. remember, you can always edit your blog. but don't obsess too much.
7. this is a public blog but we will not experience too much traffic probably.
8. all members are adminstrators. drive responsibly!
9. remember to select update service in the settings. this way you will learn about it when a fellow traveller updates the blog.
10. please, please, please, bookmark the blog and visit frequently.

keep connected!

nomos

2006-11-06T08:13:00.000-05:00

susan buck-morss spoke about Law beyond/before law as that which constitutes the very frame within which laws are formulated.